The priest gazed around my cell and answered in a voice that sounded very weary to me. 'Every stone here sweats with suffering, I know that. I have never looked at them without a feeling of anguish. But deep in my heart I know that the most wretched among you have seen a divine face emerge from their darkness. That is the face you are asked to see.' This perked me up a little. I said I had been looking at the stones in these walls for months. There wasn't anything or anyone in the world I knew better. Maybe at one time, way back, I had searched for a face in them. But the face I was looking for was as bright as the sun and the flame of desire—and it belonged to Marie.

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.