Life & Wisdom Quote by Kazuo Ishiguro

It lands like a dry complaint and a sly diagnosis of modern literary life: the novelist, once imagined as a semi-invisible craftsperson, is now expected to be a traveling act. Ishiguro’s word choice does the work. “Crawling” isn’t neutral; it suggests infestation, a crowded ecosystem where attention is scarce and bodies compete for space. “Touring” borrows the logic of pop music and stand-up: a circuit, a brand, a schedule that turns the author into a repeatable product. The punchline - “They’re like performance artists” - isn’t just a jab at colleagues. It’s a critique of an economy where the book is increasingly the excuse for the event.

The subtext is anxiety about what gets rewarded. Touring “now” implies a shift: the contemporary author is evaluated not only on sentences but on stage presence, personal narrative, political fluency, and the ability to manufacture intimacy for strangers under theater lights. Calling it “performance art” is pointed because performance art foregrounds the body and the moment; it’s ephemeral, often concept-driven, sometimes more about the spectacle of endurance than the object produced. Ishiguro is nudging us to see the book tour as an aesthetic and economic ritual: a public demonstration of authenticity.

Context matters. In an era of shrinking review sections and algorithmic discovery, publishers lean hard on live events, festivals, and social media to create “visibility.” Ishiguro, famously private and meticulous, is defending a different idea of authorship: one where the work’s voice doesn’t have to compete with the author’s. The irony is that he’s making this point in public, inside the very performance he’s skewering.