Success Quote by Harvey Korman

New York shows up here less as a city than as a pressure-cooker myth: the place you go to be “made,” and where the bill comes due if you’re not. Korman’s line turns on a deliberately melodramatic exaggeration - “went to New York and died” - that reads like a performer’s shorthand for ego death. It’s funny in its bluntness, but the humor has teeth. He’s not saying the streets were hard; he’s saying the idea of New York rewired his sense of self.

The most revealing move is the timeline: “for 10 years I walked those pavements.” That’s not a montage. It’s repetition, audition-to-audition grind, the slow erosion of confidence that happens when you’re always almost arriving. “Pavements” is tactile and unglamorous, a choice that scrapes away the skyline fantasy and replaces it with sore feet, cheap coffee, and the quiet dread of being replaceable.

When he admits he “can’t think of New York without feeling uncomfortable,” the discomfort isn’t nostalgia; it’s a body memory. The city becomes a trigger for impostor syndrome, for the fear that your ambition was naive. Calling himself “a failure” is the sharpest subtext: even if he later succeeded, the New York chapter still owns a corner of his identity, like an old review you can’t unhear. In a culture that sells struggle as a quirky origin story, Korman refuses to romanticize the bruises. He makes failure feel ongoing, not redeemed.