Art & Creativity Quote by Rube Goldberg

The genius of Rube Goldberg is how casually he can undercut his own legend. "And, uh" is doing heavy lifting here: a verbal shrug that refuses the polished, self-mythologizing posture you might expect from a man whose name became shorthand for baroque ingenuity. He sounds less like a monument and more like a working pro caught mid-sentence, half-distracted by the clutter of his own output.

Then comes the number: "about six thousand cartoons". Not "thousands", not "a lifetime of work" - a specific, slightly unbelievable count that lands like a punchline. It hints at both pride and fatigue, the way mass production in early 20th-century newspaper culture demanded relentless novelty. Goldberg is quietly reminding you that his famous contraptions weren't rare lightning bolts; they were a daily grind, churned out on deadline, idea after idea after idea.

The kicker is the add-on: "also books and papers". It's an afterthought that functions like a protest. History flattened him into a single brand - the whimsical machine guy - but he insists, almost sheepishly, on the breadth of his intellectual life. The subtext is a creative person negotiating with the archive: what survives, what gets filed away, what gets remembered. Even the "up there" matters, gesturing toward a physical hoard of work, stacked somewhere out of sight, like proof that the cartoonist's real engine wasn't the contraption on the page but the labor behind it.