Life & Mortality Quote by Harold Brodkey

Brodkey’s line lands with the offhand bravado of someone who knows exactly how strange it is to be famous “mostly abroad” and yet emotionally provincial by choice. The first clause is a small, needling indictment of American literary culture: recognition arrives, but not necessarily at home, and certainly not on schedule. Brodkey frames that disappointment as a fact, not a plea. Then he pivots to devotion, using the nautical “anchored” to imply both stability and constraint. New York isn’t just where he lives; it’s where he’s moored, tethered to a particular kind of ambition, speed, and anonymity that only the city can supply.

The punch line - “I can’t think of any other place I’d rather die than here” - works because it refuses sentimentality. It’s love, but with teeth. New York becomes less a postcard than an end-stage commitment: if the city can be harsh, it’s also the only stage big enough to make a writer feel fully implicated in his own life. The word “die” drags the conversation from career to mortality, turning “reputation” into something flimsy compared to the lived texture of a place.

Context matters: Brodkey’s career was marked by long silences, delayed masterpieces, and a mythos that often outpaced the work available to readers. Against that background, the quote reads as a compact self-mythologizing move: if posterity is fickle and the market is elsewhere, he’ll still claim the most unforgiving capital of American letters as the site of his final belonging.