Recognition, gratefulness exist.[ Speech for the Nobel Prize] is to show that this is what has come from what [Albert Camus] teacher did for him. And also throughout the world there are Monsieur Germains [his old schoolteacher] everywhere. That's why I published the letters, so that he could have a place in the work.

Catherine Camus

Categorized in : World Teacher Old School

[Albert Camus] positions are sensed. So, naturally, those intellectuals who don't have that experience have difficulty in comprehending it. But I think it made Camus more tolerant because he had already seen both sides of things when the others had only ever seen one. They imagine poverty, but they don't know what it is. In fact they've got a sort of bad conscience about the working classes.

Catherine Camus

poverty class thinking

The Outsider isn't [Albert] Camus, but in The Outsider there are parts of Camus. There's this impression of exile.

Catherine Camus

exile outsiders impression

I think [Albert Camus] wanted to write something to explain who he was, and how he was different from the age that had been conferred upon him.

Catherine Camus

age writing thinking

[Albert Camus] was viewed by many as an austere moralist, but it was on the football pitch and in the theatre that he learnt his 'morality'. It's something sensed, it won't pass uniquely through thought. It couldn't possibly.

Catherine Camus

morality theatre football

[Albert Camus] started thinking through sensation. He could never think with artefacts or with cultural models because there were none. So it's true to say that his morality was extremely 'lived', made from very concrete things. It never passed by means of abstractions . It's his own experience, his way of thinking.

Catherine Camus

mean way thinking

There are those who will find [Albert Camus] notions about absurdity appealing, and others who will be drawn by the solar side of his work, about Algeria, the heat and so on.

Catherine Camus

heat algeria sides

[Albert] Camus' was born in Algeria of French nationality, and was assimilated into the French colony, although the French colonists rejected him absolutely because of his poverty.

Catherine Camus

poverty algeria born

[Albert Camus] is The First Man because he is poor, which has never been much to human beings.

Catherine Camus

poor men firsts

[Albert Camus] really did know Algeria. He was an exile from his country, but still living in its language. Solitaire et solidaire. It's not like those who are exiled to a country where the language is not theirs.

Catherine Camus

algeria language country

[Albert Camus]didn't have much hope that things would work out, but he wanted them to. Algeria had reached such a degree of violence that once such violence is created there's no more room for reflection. And there's no mediating position. If you look at Bosnia today, the Croats, Bosnians and Serbs, they've all created so much horror that one starts to wonder how these peoples can live together, after having done what they have. Already the violence has reached such a degree that everybody is living in hate, there's no possibility of reflection, no mediating position.

Catherine Camus

work-out hate reflection

There's no one who can say 'this person is wrong there and right here', and that 'one is right about that and wrong about this'. This is what could allow populations, or even two human beings, to live together. We will only solve problems by the acceptance of, and enrichment by, our differences.

Catherine Camus

differences acceptance two

I think [Albert] Camus felt very solitary. You can see it in all his books.

Catherine Camus

solitary book thinking

Politically, [Albert Camus] was in favour of a federation, and effectively he considered that like South Africa today (or as they are trying to do), there should be a mixed population with equal rights, the same rights for the Arab and the French populations, as well as all the other races living there.

Catherine Camus

race rights trying

You end up beating your head against a wall again, it doesn't work. Not if you make an abstraction of man. That's why [Albert] Camus is more a la mode now, because he always says 'yes, but there's man. That's the first thing, because myself, I'm a man.' And that's what solidarity .

Catherine Camus

wall men firsts

We can't talk about the book [Albert Camus] wanted to write because we have barely its beginnings. He had written hardly any of it, but he needed to write it. It seems to me that if you look at the style of The First Man it conforms much more to who he was as a man, it resembles him very closely.

Catherine Camus

writing men book

The Nobel Prize comes from outside, it's a social recognition [reconnaissance] in a way. And I think a true artist is driven by interior necessities.

Catherine Camus

artist way thinking

There are indications that today the intellectuals are coming back to [Albert] Camus. History has given them reason to, with the fall of communism.

Catherine Camus

communism today fall

In fact it was always the Communist problem which was responsible for the opposition to [Albert] Camus. It was always and overall a political thing, a kind of misunderstanding.

Catherine Camus

political kind facts

[Albert]Camus had denounced the gulag and Stalin's trials. Today we can see that he was right. To say that there were concentration camps in the USSR at the time was blasphemous, something very serious indeed. Today we think about the USSR with the camps also in mind, but before it just wasn't allowed. Nobody was allowed to think that or say that if you were left-wing.

Catherine Camus

mind wings thinking

[Albert] Camus always insisted that historical criteria and historical reasoning were not the only things to take into account, and that they weren't all powerful, that history could always be wrong about man. Today, this is how we are starting to think.

Catherine Camus

powerful men thinking