Ralph Steadman - The Joke's Over (2006)

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One can derive the same fun from print-making as from making mud pies and great subtlety can be achieved through the use of transparent inks, half-tone screens and even accidental colour combinations, which is often where the art hides.

Ralph Steadman
I was in a slightly befuddled state by this time and the potent combination of watery beer and whiskey was bringing on a severe attack of drawing, as always happens when I start seeing unusual faces through a haze of controlled drinking. My body becomes a protective casing and lets me observe through the two keyholes on the front of my head.

Ralph Steadman
We thought that we had suffered all our wars and now we could enjoy a time of peace and tranquillity. However, people never learn and a newer type of war was to envelope us. We seem doomed to repeat all our mistakes and find that we are being groomed, and doomed, by the legions of war, Odin's messengers, who would have us believe that aggression is the only way forward. Now we live in a war zone, the entire world.

Ralph Steadman
Those Fear and Loathing drawings were only possible for me because of the America's Cup six months earlier, which injected the the drawings with the eerie sense of being there to record the sensations. It was a regurgitation, a psycho-artistic vomit - a creative, cathartic cleansing of my inner being.

Ralph Steadman
Let me say it here and now. For all Hunter's mindless self-indulgence, which is legendary and crude, he always impressed me with his blind, selfless urge to cut out the crony bestiality of modern society and the political economy that scarred the era.

Ralph Steadman
Funny thing about Americans. They are the first to adopt weird lifestyles and radical views but they are the most conservative race on earth.

Ralph Steadman
'Happiness is a Small Politician' - my mantra then and forever more.

Ralph Steadman
It was a carefree period and we took to it like genuine lowlife.

Ralph Steadman
I don't think that at the time, or now, come to think of it, I gave a damn. Foolishly, I wanted truth and idealism, but there was none to be had.

Ralph Steadman
Hunter Thompson wasn't Joseph Conrad, Jimmy Carter wasn't Harry Trueman. But strangely, Richard Nixon was Richard Nixon.
I'm no Pablo Picasso but there's no harm in straining. After all, the charm of any activity is in the trying and so rarely in the finished article.

Ralph Steadman
Where is Winnie the Pooh without it's illustrations?

Ralph Steadman
Today we are sacks of shit bundled into flying tubes with a security warning secreted inside every orifice.

Ralph Steadman
At least my mural of Leonardo da Vinci still exists on the wall of their offices, which were subsequently taken over by Expedia. They had the wall insured.

Ralph Steadman
I am an artist, I trade in uncertainty and superstition and cant. I invent dark visions of impossible situations that can never be resolved.

Ralph Steadman
Beware of privilege. It stinks of rotten rotten fish heads, many of which were lapping the shore beneath the jetties.

Ralph Steadman
Whores get bow-legged and bankers get mean, which is strange when you think that that if whores get bow-legged, bankers should get generous, but they never do.

Ralph Steadman
Each boat is worth the price of a new university and they are watched by gin-soaked yachting types, male and female, in captain's hats lounging in deckchairs inside Perspex covered enclosures at the front of yet more expensive, floating country houses representing nothing more than elegantly vulgar expressions of dodgy wealth. The America's Cup.

Ralph Steadman
What actually happened was that Rolling Stone paid me fifteen hundred dollars for the use of all the drawings - about twenty four of them - and then offered to buy the originals from me, which my agent urged 'was a good move!'. He sold the whole damn treasure trove to Jann Wenner for the princely sum of sixty dollars per drawing. I rue the day I let him convince me.

Ralph Steadman
By this time trapped inside the drug's reverie I could have sprayed out Michelangelo's Last Judgement on the ceiling of the Sistine Chapel. A yacht would be a beggar's handcart by comparison.

Ralph Steadman
America is ripe for lies and lethargy. The pure mountain air is going and gone. It is a huge burden and a sadness for us all.

Ralph Steadman
' Don't write, Ralph. You'll bring shame on your family. ' — Hunter S. Thompson —

Ralph Steadman
Maybe he is the Mark Twain of the late twentieth century. Time will sort the bastard out and I leave it to others more qualified than me to assess and appraise his monumental literary legacy.

Ralph Steadman
Americans live with the certain knowledge that the source of their greatness has not yet been released.

Ralph Steadman