Top 15 Ralph Steadman Quotes

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

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.

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.

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.

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.

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.

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

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.

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

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

Where is Winnie the Pooh without it's illustrations?

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.

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.

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

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.