Reuben Garrett Lucius Goldberg (July 4, 1883 – December 7, 1970), known best as Rube Goldberg, was an American cartoonist, sculptor, author, engineer, and inventor.
Many of the younger generation know my name in a vague way and connect it with grotesque inventions, but don't believe that I ever existed as a person. They think I am a nonperson, just a name that signifies a tangled web of pipes or wires or strings that suggest machinery. My name to them is like a spiral staircase, veal cutlets, barber's itch—terms that give you an immediate picture of what they mean.
I wonder how anybody can think his personality changes with his success. I've had quite a bit of success but I feel that I'm just the same person as I always was.
And uh, I'm glad that I still have my hands and my eyes to work with.
No matter how thin you slice it it's still baloney.
It just happened that the public happened to, uh, appreciate the satirical quality of these crazy things.
When I did sports cartoons, I used to uh, go to fights.
Naturally, I'm conservative; I'm a Republican. I always was.
Uh, I just had an operation last March which was rather serious and I'm recuperating now. I'm on a very bland diet. But, uh, I'm lucky, I was just lucky, that's all.
And, uh, I've got about six thousand cartoons up there, also books and papers.
And during my college, at the end of the junior year I worked in a mine.
I didn't write because in the corps I took mining engineering of all things and, you know, they, they graduate a mining engineer as a sort of an illiterate.
I, I don't think anybody's continually happy, uh, except idiots, you know. You know, you have to have little moments of depression.
Yeah, yeah. I, I don't think I'm always right. But I don't think young people are always right, either.
And, uh, I did that, and there was nothing more ridiculous to me than finding the weight of the earth because I didn't care how much the earth weighed.
I didn't have any real art training, but when I was about twelve nad thirteen, another boy and I went to a sign painter's house every Friday night and took lessons.