“I am never able to forget the possibility of block. Paradoxically, it drives my writing—compelling me to put aside everything else because of the possibility that today may be the last day I will ever be able to write. It’s another way writer’s block is sometimes not the opposite of hypergraphia but the cause. Perhaps writers could reclaim the concept of block as Saint Jerome in his study used a memento mori (a skull, or an hourglass with the sands of time slipping away) to drive his work, in those lovely Renaissance paintings”