Often when I'm writing I don't read properly. I don't even browse properly. I pick books up and put them down again or I find myself staring at the same sentence for moments on end, not knowing what it means, or I get to the end of a page and have no idea what the words my eyes have passed over are trying to say ... on the other hand, bits and pieces stick in my mind even though frequently I can't remember where I read them ... here's a few ... Joseph Conrad wrote 300 words a day. He said writing is a miserable vocation ... there is a Verlaine poem with an epigraph from a lost work of Rimbaud's, it reads: Rain fell softly over the city ... Giorgio de Chirico was born at Volos, the port from which Jason set sail for Colchis in the Argo ... the first thing ever broadcast on ABC Radio, in 1932, was a lyrebird singing ... starlings came into North America because an eccentric in New York determined to release every bird mentioned in Shakespeare to the New World ... yesterday was the 75th anniversary of the Napier Earthquake ... there is a book, just published, which is a dictionary of one letter words; it has over a thousand entries and the largest entry is for X.