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reasoned into one, we are separate beings, two separate
egos. It is important to be a self-concious ego in a self-
conscious self-willed person. This is not self-obsession.
Those who pretend selflessness are constantly acting
from self-interested motives but clothing them in various
guises. Watch those people closely in the light of
Stirner’s teaching and they appear to be hypocrites, full
of good moral and religious plans of which self-interest
is at the end and the bottom, but they are not aware of
this. That this is more than coincidence. In Stirner we
have the political development of egotism, to the dissolution
of the state. The union of free men is clear and
pronounced…
Is that boring the shit out of you? Hahahahaha!!!!!
Just that whole thing gets to me because it is about
self and yet you’re not being selfish. You care about
people. But you want people to be straightforward
and honest in reply, if they can help you or you can
help them. Surely that’s better! That’s community,
that what we’re afraid of doing and we’re killing it.
You know, we’re really destroying ourselves because
we’re really making the motivating force of anything
we do selfish. Really acquisitive in a way that’s really
not the point of it.
If there was one book that you could now illustrate,
what would it be?
I think it’s gotta be Rabelais’ Gargantua And Pan-
BUY Ralph Steadman books online from and
degruel, about the big baby creature. It’s a tough one.
I tell you what I’ve just illustrated: Fahrenheit 451,
which is the temperature at which books burn, and Ray
Bradbury wrote the book 50 years ago, (he’s still alive),
and together that’s what I illustrated for him. When I’d
done it, he said: ‘You’ve brought my book into the 21st
century. Thank you’. Which is the nicest thing to say.
The book is as important as Nineteen Eighty Four
and Animal Farm as real powerful social comment,
because it’s about a fire brigade burning books. So that
they try and stamp out ideas and a group of people get
together and each of them take it upon themselves to
learn by heart one book before they get burnt. It’s really
worth a read. I’d say get the book but you can’t at
the moment because there’s only 451 copies, a limited
edition. But I’m sure Simon & Schuster or someone’ll
do it. He wrote another wonderful book called The Illustrated
Man. To write Fahrenheit 451, Ray Bradbury
hired a typewriter and a room for 38 cents a day and
he wrote it in 9 days. Try and read the book cos it’s
kinda interesting, a definite must to read because of the
implications of burning every book in the world.
You worked on Private Eye didn’t you?
I did in the 1960s. That was when I got involved
firstly with Punch, but they weren’t really interested in
social comment, they wanted jokes. And I went to Private
Eye with a joke called ‘Plastic People’ and Private
Eye bought it for 5 pounds and said: ‘More power to
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