What do prisoners do? Write, of course; even if they have to use blood as ink, as the Marquis de Sade did. The reasons they write, the exquisitely frustrating restrictions of their autonomy and the fact that no one listens to their cries, are all the reasons that mentally ill people, and even many normal people write. We write to escape our prisons.

The Midnight Disease: The Drive to Write, Writer's Block, and the Creative Brain (ed. Houghton Mifflin Harcourt, 2015) - ISBN: 9780547525099