Wit & Attitude Quote by Harold Brodkey

New York here isn’t a city so much as a drug with good lighting: addictive, terrifying, and necessary. Brodkey’s verb stack - “crazy,” “dependent,” “scared” - reads like a confession from someone who knows the romance is also a pathology. The parenthetical aside, “well, it is dangerous,” is a sly act of self-correction: he punctures the melodrama with a plain fact, then keeps going. The real danger isn’t muggings; it’s the psychic tax of trying to become yourself in public.

Brodkey’s subtext is about the particular New York bargain offered to young writers in the postwar literary economy: access and pressure, proximity to editors and rivals, the constant hum of other people’s ambition. “Trademark work, breakthrough work” borrows the language of branding and careerism, a slightly acidic nod to how art gets turned into a product line. He’s not just anxious about making good work; he’s anxious about making the kind of work that creates a recognizable silhouette, a signature that can survive the crowd.

Context matters: Brodkey became famous for promise as much as for pages, a writer whose legend was partly built on delay and expectation. That makes the sentence feel like both diagnosis and prophecy. New York amplifies unfinishedness. It offers you the stage before you have the act, then makes you live with the gap between your hunger and your output. The line captures that cruel, familiar moment when youth is less an asset than a deadline.