Daily Inspiration Quote by Ralph Steadman

Steadman’s line is a cartoonist’s growl at the fussy border patrol of “proper” writing. The joke lands because it’s staged as a confession of inadequacy - “no right buggering about” - while also being a sideways boast. He’s not really apologizing; he’s declaring allegiance to a different kind of precision. Artists, especially Steadman’s kind, traffic in gesture, distortion, smear, and instant impact. Verbs and split infinitives are the opposite: slow, rule-bound, policed by pedants and classroom red ink. He makes that contrast feel bodily, like swapping a paint-spattered studio for a grammar tribunal.

The subtext is a jab at the cultural hierarchy that treats “writer” as the serious, cerebral job and “cartoonist” as the unruly cousin. Steadman flips it: writing becomes the fussy craft of tinkering with tiny parts, while his medium claims the right to be blunt, messy, and true in a single frame. It’s also an affectionate self-distance from the authority of prose - useful for someone whose drawings routinely puncture authority. If you’re always skewering politicians, celebrities, and the sanctimony of public language, you don’t want to sound like you’re applying for a literary prize.

Context matters: Steadman is inseparable from Gonzo journalism’s collision of image and voice, where “objectivity” was already a joke and style was the point. This quote protects that outsider stance. It keeps him free to be crude, fast, and devastating - the virtues of a good caricature, and, quietly, of a good sentence too.