“The midnight disease is a kind of emotional insomnia, at every conscious moment its victim— even if he or she writes at dawn, or in the middle of the afternoon— feels like a person lying in a sweltering bedroom, with the window thrown open, looking up at a sky filled with stars and airplanes, listening to the narrative of a rattling blind, an ambulance, a fly trapped in a Coke bottle, while all around him the neighbors soundly sleep. This is my opinion why writers— like insomniacs— are so accident-prone, so obsessed with the calculus of bad luck and missed opportunities, so liable to rumination and a concomitant inability to let go of a subject, even when urged repeatedly to do so.”

— Michael Chabon, Wonder Boys, (which ranked #2 on my 20 Best Books I Read in 2009)