It’s not a profession, this track you’re on. It’s a vocation – a calling. There’s no pension plan, there are no guarantees, and there’s no magic potion. What you’ve chosen to do is brave and risky, but it’s also necessary – increasingly necessary as we move into a future for which no one, right now, has a convincing blueprint. You’ll be taking the ancient, ancient human language and its songs and stories that have been passed down to you  changing as you they go;  and through inspiration and hard work that will in turn  be moulded by their time,  as everything we’ve done is and has been; and then you’ll pass these forms on in your turn, if we’re lucky. If we are all very lucky.

~ Margaret Atwood, speech to the Whiting Foundation