"The night is the hardest time to be alive and 4am knows all my secrets."
— Poppy Z. Brite

"It's a rare book that wins the battle against drooping eyelids."
— Tracy Chevalier

"I've always envied people who sleep easily. Their brains must be cleaner, the floorboards of the skull well swept, all the little monsters closed up in a steamer trunk at the foot of the bed."
— David Benioff (City of Thieves)

"Insomnia is a variant of Tourette's--the waking brain races, sampling the world after the world has turned away, touching it everywhere, refusing to settle, to join the collective nod. The insomniac brain is a sort of conspiracy theorist as well, believing too much in its own paranoiac importance--as though if it were to blink, then doze, the world might be overrun by some encroaching calamity, which its obsessive musings are somehow fending off."
— Jonathan Lethem (Motherless Brooklyn)

"In its early stages, insomnia is almost an oasis in which those who have to think or suffer darkly take refuge."
— Colette