‘Create Dangerously’ was a speech delivered at the University of Uppsala in Sweden in December of 1957, a few days after Camus was awarded the Nobel Prize in Literature.

p1 - An Oriental wise man always used to ask the divinity in his prayers to be so kind as to spare him from living in an interesting era. As we are not wise, the divinity has not spared us and we are living in an interested era. In any case, our era forces us to take an interest in it.

p1 - cannot hope to remain aloof in order to pursue reflections and images that are dear to him. Until the present moment, remaining aloof has always been possible … Today everything is changed and even silence has dangerous implications.

p1 - The moment that abstaining from choice is itself looked upon as choice

p2 - until now the artist was on the sidelines. He used to sing purposely, for his own sake

p3 - the armchair genius is over. To create today is to create dangerously.

p5 - In most cases the artists is ashamed of himself and his privileges

p7 - For about a century we have been living in a society that is not even the society of money ... but that of the abstract symbols of money. ... A society founded on signs is, in its essense, an artificial society ... There is no reason for being surprised that such a society chose as its religion a moral code of formal principles and that it inscribes that words 'liberty' and 'equality' on its prisons as well as on its temples of finance.

p8 - for a hundred years a society of merchants made an exclusive and unilateral use of liberty, looking upon it as a right rather than a duty … such a society asked art to be, not an instrument of liberation, but an inconsiquential exercise and a mere entertainment?

p9 - Any artist who goes in for being famous in our society must know that it is not he who will become famous, but someone else under his name, someone who will eventually escape him and perhaps someday kill the true artist in him.

p9 - until almost the time of the French Revolution current literature was, in the main, a literature of consent. From the moment when middle-class society, a result of revolution, became stabilized, a literature of revolt developed instead.

p11 - the contemporary artist gets the illusion that he is creating his own rule and eventually takes himself for God. … But, cut off from his society, he will create nothing…

p12 - men wanted the artist instead to speak intentionally about and for the majority. He has only to translate the sufferings and happiness of all into the language of all … if there is any man who has no right to solitude, it is the artist. … Art cannot be a monologue.

p13 - Dreams change from individual to individual, but the reality of the world is common to us all.

p17 - we shall devote ourselve, on the one hand, to negating and condemning whatever aspects of reality are not socialistic and, on the other hand, to glorifying what is or will become so.

p19 - It sacrifices art for an end that is alien to art but that, in the scale of values, may seem to rank higher. In short, it surpresses art temporarily in order to establish justice first.

p20 - The suffering of mankind is such a vast subject

p21 - What, then, is art? Nothing simple, that is certain. … On the one hand, genius is expected to be splendid and solitary; on the other hand, it is called upon to resemble all.

p21 - So it is with art, which is nothing without reality and without which reality is insignificant.

p22 - Art is neither complete rejection nor complete acceptance of what is.

p23 - The greater an artist’s revolt against the world’s reality, the greater can be the weight of reality to balance that revolt. … the work that maintains an equilibrium between reality and man’s rejection of that reality

p23 - That’s just it and yet that’s not it; the world is nothing and the world is everything

p24 - The aim of art, on the contrary, is not to legislate or to reign supreme, but rather to understand first of all.

p32 - ‘Every wall is a door’

p32 - Great ideas, … come into the world as gently as doves.

p35 - Men like you and me who in the morning patted children on the head would a few hours later become meticulous executioners.

p36 - the most difficult battle to be won against the enemy in the future must be fought within ourselves, with an exceptional effort that will transform our appetite for hatred into a desire for justice.

p42 - The simplest, and hence most tempting, thing is to blame governments or some obscure powers for such naughty behavior. Besides, it is indeed true that they are guilty … we have lost sight of its beginnings. But they are not the only ones responsible.

p43 - And if freedom is regressing today throughout such a large part of the world, this is probably because the devices for enslavement have never been so cynically chosen or so effective, but also because her real defenders … have turned away.

p44 - after Marx, the rumor began to spread and gain strength that freemdom was a bourgeois hoax … that bourgeois society prostituted freedom

p45 - The contention was that we needed justice first and that we would come to freedom later on

p48 - How then can this infernal circle be broken? … the value of freedom — and by never again agreeing to its being sacrificed, even temporarily, or separated from our demand for justice.

p50 - separating freedom from justice is tantamount to separating culture and labour

p51 - there are two ways for an intellectual to betray at present, and in both cases he betrays because he accepts a single thing --- that separation between labour and culture. The first way is characteristic of bourgeios intellectuals who are willing that their privileges should be paid for by the enslavement of the workers. They often say that they are defending freedom, but they are defending first of all the privileges freedom gives to them, and to them alone. p52 - freedom is not made up principally of privileges; it is made up especially of duties. p54 - we shall be sure that freedom is not a gift received from a State or a leader but a possession to be won every day by the effort of each and the union of all.