Kurt Vonnegut in Forbes:
What I do, which is becoming more and more impractical I think, is make people respond to idiosyncratic arrangements of 26 phonetic symbols and ten Arabic numbers in horizontal lines on a page. And there was a time when this was a form of home entertainment, and so it was worthwhile for people to learn how to read. But reading it is actually quite difficult–I mean it is as hard as learning to read music, and it’s a remarkable skill. And if you take ink on paper and make people respond to it, they themselves are going to have to be performers. It’s like arriving at a concert hall and being handed a violin, and you’re expected to play. That’s what we expect readers to do, perform themselves, because they’re half of the performance.