Very much so. I went to synagogue regularly. My first education was interpreting the Bible. But I also grew up with German folk songs and stories, which became as much a part of my imagination as the Bible stories. My sense of history came from these stories—I was fascinated with what you might call fairy-tale-shaped history. But from the beginning I felt I belonged to a different people, which wasn’t any problem for me. I made the German landscape, which was very beautiful to me—flowing rivers, mountains, forests, lakes—into a biblical landscape. The valley of sunshine into which we went on school excursions in my imagination became the valley in which David and Goliath fought.

the thesis in the book is that computers need to understand human emotions just the way people do. I read the book and I was just fascinated by this idea. I made that my research topic and it became my obsession and it just really changed the trajectory of my life.

I picked What Is Ancient Philosophy? by Pierre Hadot. That book, and philosophy as a way of life. And this is where Hadot brings out that philosophy is not primarily about the propositional. It’s not primarily about declarative discourse. Philosophy is a way of life in which you’re training skills, states of mind, perspectives, traits of characters, and those are all the components of virtue.

The Power of Now by Eckhart Tolle. That book changed my life, blew my mind. If you’re going to read that book, take it slow in my opinion.

Sensitivity. Be sensitive in every way possible about everything in life. Be sensitive. Insensitivity brings indifference and nothing is worse than indifference. Indifference makes that person dead before the person dies.

After the war — I was 15 when I entered the camp, I was 16 when I left it, and all of a sudden you become an orphan and you have no one. I had a little sister and I knew, with my mother the first night, that they were swept away by fire. My older sisters I discovered by accident after the war in Paris, where I was in an orphanage. But to be an orphan — you can become an orphan at 50, you are still an orphan. Very often I think of my father and my mother. At any important moment in my life, they are there, thinking, “What an injustice.”

Well, naturally, my grandfather. He was a Hasid, meaning a member of the Hasidic community, and I loved him, I adored him. So thanks to him, I became a Hasid too. And my mother — who actually continued his tradition — she’s the one who brought me to Hasidic Masters. And all the stories I tell now — I’ve written so many books with Hasidic tales — these are not mine, these are theirs, my mother’s and my grandfather’s. My father taught me how to reason, how to reach my mind. My soul belonged to my grandfather and my mother. They enriched me, of course. They influenced me profoundly, to this day. When I write, I have the feeling, literally, physically, that one of them is behind my back, looking over my shoulder and reading what I’m writing. I’m terribly afraid of their judgment.

It went from publisher to publisher to publisher. All of them refused it. They gave the same reasons, until a small publisher picked it up. From 1960 to 1963, three years, it didn’t sell 1500 copies. Nobody wanted to read it. It doesn’t matter. I am not here to sell, I’m here to write.