Notes from Georges Perec, Especes d'Espace:

I write in order to peruse myself. - Henri Michaux

Alexandre Dumas had a tower built each stone of which had the title of one of his books engraved on it.

The bed is an instrumenty conceived for the nocturnal repose of one or two patrons, but no more

The bailiffs don't have the power to seize YOUR bed

Marcel Mauss - 'Techniques of the Body', Sociologie et Anthropologie, p. 378 - sleeping lying down isn't natural

summer of 1954 - following the Geneva Agreements and negotiations with Tunisia and Morocco, the entire planet experienced peace...for only a few days

what does 'nycthemeral' mean?

Raymond Queneau: Pierrot Mon Ami

We should learn to live more on staircases. But how?

Is 13A an odd or even number?

that part of the town you don't need to go to, precisely because you're already there

Why not have five or six rooms dotted around Paris?

Flaubert thought sugar was luminous and wanted to paint Paris houses with this or other luminous coatings

Space seems to be either tamer or more inoffensive than time; we're forever meeting people who have compasses, very seldom people who have compasses

a 'journal' is a unit of space, it's the surface area a farm labourer can work in a day

Elephants are generally drawn smaller than life size, but a flea always larger. - Jonathan Swift

A written confession is always truthful. - Italo Svevo

He drew a few circles on the yellow wooden seat of the bench

The conjuror who was so good at deceiving himself

the carapace of writing behind which I concealed my desire to write

these crudenesses didn't signify but they did signal

On that day, the analyst heard what I had to say to him, what for four years he had listened to without hearing , for the simple reason that I wasn't telling it to him, because I wasn't telling it to myself.