"When all else is gone, it is stories that can save us. Ambiguity and complexity are at the heart of human condition and now more than ever we need writers to remind us of this.... We are the custodians of empathy, the gateway to otherness. [It is writers who can show] how it feels to be someone else, or to believe something else. This sometimes horrifies us, but it is the best books that take us to these places.... Long live stories, the written world and the publishers who believe in it and booksellers who press it into hands of readers, agents who help writers up and everyone else engaged in this great labor of love and faith."
--Writer and broadcaster Sally Magnusson in her keynote speech at the Scottish Book Trade Conference in Edinburgh (via the Bookseller)