Fatherhood Quote by Edward G. Robinson

There is affection in the confession, but it lands like a quiet indictment. Edward G. Robinson, the man audiences knew as a hard-edged gangster and crisp authority figure, frames his collecting habit as something with collateral damage. The image is bluntly physical: men "turned their lungs black" not in some abstract pursuit of beauty or legacy, but in the very specific, bodily cost of smoke. Robinson makes the collector's impulse sound less like refined taste and more like appetite, something that needs feeding.

The phrasing "trying to satisfy" does a lot of work. It suggests a family orbiting a desire that can never be fully met, a child (or adult) whose "zeal" becomes a household project. "My father and uncles and all their friends" widens the radius of obligation: collecting isn't just personal; it recruits a network. The subtext is familiar to anyone who has watched a hobby become a personality: other people start doing the dirty work, literally in this case, to keep the engine of wanting running.

Context sharpens it. Robinson was a serious art collector, and the era he lived through glamorized cigarettes while hiding their long-term consequences in plain sight. The line reads like a later-life reckoning: the charming story of relatives hunting down objects for him is retold with a darker light, a recognition that his "zeal" had a human price. It's a sly reversal of the collector's myth. Instead of treasures elevating the family, the family pays in breath.