A few years ago I did my first reading....Eventually my turn came, and the words that I had written in silence...unfolded themselves like lawn chairs in my mouth and emerged one by one wearing large Siberian hats of consonants and long erminous vowels and landed softly, without visible damage, here and there in the audience, and I thought, Gosh, I'm reading aloud, from Chapter Seven!
—Nicholson Baker, "Reading Aloud," in The Size of Thoughts