I think that the mark of a great book is that it will meet you wherever you're at and you'll feel and experience something new and different each time you read it.
Shakespeare is renewed each time you see it or read it. I've seen 'Midsummer Night's Dream' so many times, and each time it's a little different, or a different line leaps out at me. It's like re-reading a good book over and over, always noticing something you hadn't seen the time before - and that's rare.
I keep stacks of Autobiography of a Yogi around the house, and I give it out constantly to people. When people need 'regrooving,' I say read this, because it cuts to the heart of every religion.
Something that's interesting is how my perspective on different events can change over time even though the events themselves haven't changed. As I get older, I interpret something differently, or I can even interpret a person differently.
I love biographies. I read Patti Smith's 'Just Kids.' I'm into that time frame in New York, the '70s and '80s. In art school, I read 'Close to the Knives,' the autobiography of the artist and AIDS activist David Wojnarowicz.
The difference between the first time I read something and the tenth time I read something is generally pretty profound. Even if the script is the same, just the way that I read it is different.
Once I read autobiography as what the writer thought about his or her life. Now I think, 'This is what they thought at that time'. An interim report - that is what an autobiography is.
I read everything. When I say everything, I read everything: children's literature, Y.A., science fiction, fantasy, romance - I read it all. Each genre fulfills a different need I have. Each book teaches me something.
Justice. To be ever ready to admit that another person is something quite different from what we read when he is there (or when we think about him). Or rather, to read in him that he is certainly something different, perhaps something completely different from what we read in him. Every being cries out silently to be read differently.
I always imagined that I would learn something each time that I would take to a new project, then I realized that each new project poses a completely different challenge.
I re-read the books I assign to my students. Each time I do, I learn something new.
If you publish Mahatma Gandhi's autobiography, no one will read it but if it's Madhuri Dixit's or Madhubala's autobiography people will come and read it.
Such reproductions may not interest the reader; but after all, this is my autobiography, not his; he is under no obligation to read further in it; he was under none to begin. A modest or inhibited autobiography is written without entertainment to the writer and read with distrust by the reader.
'Ulysses' is like a big box of tricks that you can dive into. Each time you read it, you find something new.
Autobiography of a Yogi is justifiably celebrated as one of the most entertaining and enlightening spiritual books ever written.
'Yogi Bear' changed my life in ways that I can't explain because it's not a full feature on me. 'Yogi Bear' - there's everything before 'Yogi Bear,' and there's everything after 'Yogi Bear.' Like a major car accident, or the birth of Christ.