And, on a wide view, I could see that it makes little difference whether one dies at the age of thirty or threescore and ten—since, in either case, other men and women will continue living, the world will go on as before. Also, whether I died now or forty years hence, this business of dying had to be got through, inevitably. Still, somehow this line of thought wasn't as consoling as it should have been; the idea of all those years of life in hand was a galling reminder!

Soon after the event on 6 August 1945 he was one of the few French editors to publicly express opposition and disgust to the United States' dropping the atomic bomb in Hiroshima. His views contributed to the rise of the philosophy known as absurdism. To distinguish his ideas scholars sometimes refer to the Paradox of the Absurd when referring to "Camus's Absurd".

In an interview in 1945 Camus rejected any ideological associations: "No I am not an existentialist. Sartre and I are always surprised to see our names linked. In 1949 Camus founded the Group for International Liaisons within the Revolutionary Union Movement after his split with Garry Davis's Citizens of the World movement of which the surrealist André Breton was also a member.