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 windows 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 in 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