Catherine Camus famous quotes

[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

#Thinking #Class #Poverty

During the '80s, those you would call the young philosophers of France, such as Bernard-Henri Lévy and [André ] Gluxman, pointed out that Camus had said things no one wanted to hear in the political arena. They said it was [Albert] Camus who was right, not those who had slid under the influence of Sartre, that is to say an unconditional devotion to Communism as seen in the Soviet Union. And ever since then the evaluation of Camus has continued to modify up until today
-- Catherine Camus

#Political #Unions #Today

Of course, [Albert Camus] wasn't an existentialist, but he was a committed man. He was a man of combat. It wasn't for nothing that he directed the Resistance journal called Combat.
-- Catherine Camus

#Men #Resistance #Existentialist

The First Man is completely autobiographical. The mother [Albert Camus] describes is the woman I knew, and she was exactly as he describes her. And this teacher really existed.
-- Catherine Camus

#Mother #Teacher #Men

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

#Outsiders #Impression #Exile

[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

I think for [Albert] Camus his mother was more than just that. She's love, absolute love. That's why it's written for her, dedicated to 'you who will never be able to read this book'.
-- Catherine Camus

#Mother #Book #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

#Algeria #Sides #Heat

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

#Book #Thinking #Solitary

I think for an artist what is most important is to touch as many hearts as possible.
-- Catherine Camus

#Heart #Artist #Thinking

[Albert Camus] was completely intransigent, and that's not at all a neutrality. It's combat, it's a man who involved himself, committed himself.
-- Catherine Camus

#Men #Neutrality #Combat

[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

#Algeria #Poverty #Born

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

#Rights #Race #Trying

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

#Men #Firsts #Poor

[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

#Country #Algeria #Language

[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

#Hate #Reflection #Work Out

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

#Acceptance #Two #Differences

Where [Albert Camus] is in exile isn't especially in Paris or elsewhere, but from the intellectual world, because of his origins.
-- Catherine Camus

#Paris #Intellectual #World

French intellectuals are mostly petit bourgeois, and it's hard to say whether that makes [Albert] Camus' work more valuable.
-- Catherine Camus

#Valuable #Bourgeois #Hard

[Albert Camus] also says that nothing is true which forces exclusion. From that, you're obliged to accept contradictions if you don't want to reject certain obvious things about life, certain evidences. If you create a system, and you say 'here there is truth', in that kind of pathway [chemin], then you'll evacuate all the other pathways and you'll kill life. It's up to each individual.
-- Catherine Camus

#Obvious Things #Pathways #Want

It's true that women appear very little in [Albert Camus] works. They have a very marginal place.
-- Catherine Camus

#Littles

Femininity, yes, effectively there is more in The First Man, not only in terms of women but stylistically, in its elements, the notes he wrote. You can see a real love story in it, a childhood love story, [Albert] Camus' first. Meursault [protagonist of The Outsider] and Marie were never up to much really. There is Dora in The Just and others in his plays, but they aren't so well known.
-- Catherine Camus

#Real #Men #Play

Love is very important in The First Man, in that [Albert] Camus loves these things he never chose, he loves his childhood experience in a very real way. Their poverty meant that there was nothing else they could think about but what they would eat, how they would clothe themselves. There's just no room for other things in his family. It's difficult for others to imagine the position in which he found himself. There is no imaginary existence in their lives.
-- Catherine Camus

#Real #Love Is #Men

[French intellectuals] could never address themselves to the working classes. They don't know what it means, and that gives them a bad conscience about it. [Albert] Camus has a greater proximity to those in poverty.
-- Catherine Camus

#Mean #Class #Giving

[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 #Thinking #Way

[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

#Football #Theatre #Morality

Just after the war, the liberation of 1945, [Albert] Camus was well known, well loved by [Jean-Paul ] Sartre and all the intellectuals of that generation.
-- Catherine Camus

#War #Generations #Well Known

[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

#Thinking #Wings #Mind

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 #Facts #Kind

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

#Fall #Today #Communism

In publishing The First Man I said to myself, 'this is going to be awful,' but awful from the point of view of the criticism. I'm not afraid of [Albert] Camus' public. I'm afraid of what will be written in the papers.
-- Catherine Camus

#Men #Views #Criticism

Albert Camus was never abandoned by his readers. Camus is enormously read. He's the highest selling author in the entire Gallimard collection, and has been for some years now. Sales haven't ever stopped, so to talk about rediscovering him would suggest that he isn't read anymore and that's not true.
-- Catherine Camus

#Years #Selling #Abandoned

There is an interview given by [ Jean-Paul] Sartre in the USA where he is asked what the future of French literature is, and he replies that the next great writer of the future is [Albert] Camus.
-- Catherine Camus

#Usa #Literature #Next

So time passes, and a much more political rather than literary reasoning intervenes, and from the day that [Albert] Camus wrote The Rebel, in 1955, there comes the rupture, and all, nearly all of the left wing intellectuals become hostile to him. Since he was already unfavourably viewed by the right-wing, he found himself entirely alone.
-- Catherine Camus

#Wings #Political #Rebel

Intellectuals of [Albert] Camus' age who had previously disliked him now appreciate him. And at that point we come back to literature, and it's agreed that he was always a great writer.
-- Catherine Camus

#Appreciate #Age #Literature

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

#Writing #Thinking #Age

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

#Book #Writing #Men

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 #Thinking #Way

[Albert Camus] wasn't writing under the influence of the Nobel Prize. That was an external thing for the artist in him.
-- Catherine Camus

#Writing #Artist #Influence

The First Man is [Albert Camus] posthumous last work. But in fact, in a certain way, it is his first, because in it you find the signs of his commitments, and of the whole way of writing as well. This mixture of austerity and sensuality, the will to speak for those not able to speak for themselves.
-- Catherine Camus

#Writing #Commitment #Mixtures

We must remember that [Albert] Camus wrote not even a third of what he had wished to.
-- Catherine Camus

#Remember #Thirds

What the articles which have been written about The First Man propose is humility. The acceptance of these contradictions. Seeking an explanation is death. The lie is death in [Albert] Camus. That's why in Camus' play The Misunderstood the son dies, killed by his sister and his mother, because he lied. He never told them who he was. They killed him because they didn't recognise him.
-- Catherine Camus

#Mother #Lying #Humility

[Albert] Camus writes his acceptance speech for the Nobel Prize in thanks to his teacher.
-- Catherine Camus

#Teacher #Writing #Acceptance

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

#Teacher #Old School #World

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

Just because of [Albert Camus] way of sensing before thinking. He's in a field that he often feels like escaping from. In any case, you have to learn what blood is. It all has to be rationalised. In that he feels exiled, solitary.
-- Catherine Camus

#Thinking #Escaping #Blood

One thing that is evident is that [Albert] Camus could never be a 'neutral' man. This is because he was committed; look at his real physical involvement in the Resistance. He took part, there, in the combat against Nazism.
-- Catherine Camus

#Real #Men #Looks

[Albert Camus] always held a profound commitment [engagement], a real resistance to all totalitarianism.
-- Catherine Camus

#Real #Commitment #Profound

For example, it's often forgotten that [Albert ] Camus was extremely hostile [farouche] towards the [Francisco] Franco regime, and right to the end. He refused to travel to Spain, he left UNESCO because UNESCO accepted Franco's Spain and allowed it a discourse.
-- Catherine Camus

#Spain #Example #Forgotten

[Albert Camus] was not an existentialist!
-- Catherine Camus

#Existentialist

Everyone has so much hope for a better humanity, and many, including [Jean Paul] Sartre, turned to the idea of communism in its beginnings. Generosity had a place in people's hopes.
-- Catherine Camus

#Ideas #People #Generosity

[Albert] Camus points out that we have a lot of things to pass through. Everything has to be accepted before it can be improved.
-- Catherine Camus

#Accepted

When [Jean-Paul] Sartre was asked whether or not he would live under a communist regime he said, "No, for others it's fine, but for me, no." He said it! So it's hard to say just how intellectual his stance is. How can you think that never in your life would you go to live in a communist regime and still say it's fine for everybody? A very difficult thing, that, but Sartre managed it.
-- Catherine Camus

#Thinking #Intellectual #Communist

Today this is what we are confronted with, I mean what is pure ideology, which takes no account of the human context. In economics it's the same. Economics wanted to take into account theory over and above human criteria, or the parameter 'man'.
-- Catherine Camus

#Mean #Men #Today

I couldn't ever act or think on behalf of what my father [[Albert Camus]] would have said or done. He's an artist, he considers himself an artist, and so he takes on the responsibility of speaking for those who are not given the means or the opportunity.
-- Catherine Camus

#Father #Mean #Responsibility