"Like many insomniacs, I always feel a bit of bully pride in getting by on a few fractured hours each night while others complain if they don’t get a full, conked-out eight."

"For the insomniac Vladimir Nabokov, I think that sleep, which he called 'the most moronic fraternity in the world, with the heaviest dues and the crudest rituals,' meant turning off, even for a few hours, his quicksilver, voracious consciousness. The daily nocturnal rest that presages the ultimate big sleep of mortality was for him a price both vexing and insulting, a 'nightly betrayal of reason, humanity, genius.'"