Halldór Laxness

In his 1955 Nobel Prize acceptance speech, Laxness paid loving tribute to those who made him who he was as a writer and human being: his family, the faithful inhabitants of the "book-loving nation" of Iceland and, most importantly, the ancient Icelandic scribes:

My thoughts fly to the old Icelandic storytellers who created our classics, whose personalities were so bound up with the masses that their names, unlike their lives' work, have not been preserved for posterity. They live in their immortal creations and are as much a part of Iceland as her landscape. For century upon dark century those nameless men and women sat in their mud huts writing books without so much as asking themselves what their wages would be, what prize or recognition would be theirs. There was no fire in their miserable dwellings at which to warm their stiff fingers as they sat up late at night over their stories. Yet they succeeded in creating not only a literary language which is among the most beautiful and subtlest there is, but a separate literary genre. While their hearts remained warm, they held on to their pens.

Certainly puts my efforts at getting my first short story published into proper perspective.