Great writers are either husbands or lovers. Some writers supply the solid virtues of a husband: reliability, intelligibility, generosity, decency. There are other writers in whom one prizes the gifts of a lover, gifts of temperament rather than of moral goodness. Notoriously, women tolerate qualities in a lover -- moodiness, selfishness, unreliability, brutality -- that they would never countenance in a husband, in return for excitement, an infusion of intense feeling.

Source: "Camus' Notebooks", Against Interpretation