Art & Creativity Quote by Kazuo Ishiguro

Prestige, Ishiguro suggests, is a brand with a shifting logo. The Booker Prize sells certainty - a sticker that promises quality - yet its actual meaning dissolves on contact with the next shortlist. His target isn’t the prize’s winners so much as the cultural machinery that turns “award-winning” into a substitute for judgment, then quietly changes the criteria without changing the confidence.

The repetition of “not quite sure” is doing sly work. It mimics the consumer’s half-formed doubt in a bookstore aisle: I’ve heard this matters, but what am I buying into? Ishiguro’s subtext is that prizes trade on the aura of stable “literary values” while benefiting from instability. If the Booker stood for one coherent aesthetic, it would be predictable, even boring; its annual reinvention keeps it newsworthy, debatably relevant, and therefore powerful. The prize remains authoritative precisely because its authority can’t be pinned down.

Context matters: Ishiguro came up in a British literary ecosystem where gatekeeping institutions - prizes, supplements, juries - help decide what counts as “serious.” When he points out that the Booker “stands for something different” each year, he’s not merely critiquing inconsistency; he’s exposing how cultural capital is manufactured. The Booker becomes less a compass than a weather vane, registering the current anxieties and fashions of publishing, politics, and taste. The reader is left with an uncomfortable implication: the sticker isn’t wrong, it’s just vague by design.