War & Peace Quote by Neil Gaiman

Awards culture loves to dress its taste up as virtue, and Neil Gaiman is needling that costume. His line hinges on a blunt, almost weary assumption: “serious” is treated as a moral category, not a descriptor. The “great, big” part isn’t just about page count or ambition; it’s a wink at institutional optics. Thickness signals labor. Gravity signals importance. A prize committee can point to a doorstopper about war, grief, or history and feel it has endorsed Literature with a capital L.

The subtext is less “funny books deserve trophies too” than “we’ve built a prestige economy that punishes pleasure.” Comedy, by its nature, makes art look easy. A successful funny novel disguises the engineering: timing, tonal control, the risk of being dismissed as lightweight. When it lands, it can feel like play rather than work, and awards bodies reliably confuse effort with value.

Gaiman’s intent also reads as protective of genre and imaginative writing, which frequently gets shunted into a separate, lesser cabinet: fantasy can be “world-building” but not “insight,” humor can be “entertaining” but not “significant.” By framing it as a “battle,” he exposes the scarcity mindset behind accolades: a single podium spot that tends to go to the book that best flatters the judges’ self-image as stewards of seriousness.

It’s not cynicism for its own sake; it’s a diagnostic. We don’t just reward books. We reward the idea of ourselves as people who prefer vegetables to dessert, even when dessert took more craft to bake.