Daniel Tammet Quotes
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I was desperate for a friend, and I used to lie in bed at night thinking about what it would be like. My younger brothers and sisters had friends, and I used to watch them playing to try to work out what they did and how friendship worked.
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One of the lines from my books is about having respect for different minds, and if I had to have an epitaph at this point in my life, that would be it.
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I love music. I have a fondness for Chopin, and I very much like his 'Raindrop Prelude.'
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My mother is not a model. She is not perfect. That awareness is part of learning to love someone. Predicting the actions of someone is an act of love. We persist, even when we get it wrong. That's the beauty of love.
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Of course creativity is a mystery. We don't know what drives it or what constitutes it. It's one of those things, like genius, you know it when you see it but it's impossible to define.
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How any person decides to emphasize strengths and mitigate weaknesses is something people have to figure out for themselves. I'm wary of the self-help literature that suggests there are certain rules. I'm very happy for people to look at my story and say it's possible to achieve many things.
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I can well imagine that certain writers, even writers that we'd consider today very great writers, may not necessarily have tested highly on IQ just because of their numerical skills, or maybe they may not be very good at memory, and are not particularly good at these kinds of tests.
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When things don't come so naturally to you, you want to persevere, you want to keep pushing yourself to overcome obstacles that prevent you from having the kind of life that you want to have.
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37 is a lumpy number, a bit like porridge. Six is very small and dark and cold, and whenever I was little trying to understand what sadness is I would imagine myself inside a number six and having that experience of cold and darkness. Similarly, number four is a shy number.
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The way that I approached numbers, think about them, the same as for language as well-acquiring vocabulary, understanding the grammar, the structures of languages, the rhythm, the music and so-on - these things obviously evolved.
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Aesthetics - rather than reason - shapes our thought processes. First comes aesthetics, then logic. 'Thinking in Numbers' is not about an attempt to impress the reader but to include the reader, draw the reader in, by explaining my experiences - the beauty I feel in a prime number, for example.
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I did have a very restricted, regimented life. There was a kind of happiness there, a contentment, but it was a small happiness within very clear and delineated borders.
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My algebra was relatively poor. I found it very difficult to use equations that substituted numbers - to which I had a synesthetic and emotional response - for letters, to which I had none. It was because of this that I decided not to continue math at Advanced level, but chose to study history, French and German instead.
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I'm very comfortable with the idea of there being late bloomers, and for me, of course, there's no difficulty at all in the way that I think of talent and achievement and so on.
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From 'Embracing the Wide Sky', I went to the States, to Canada and to different parts of Europe as well. I gave interviews in several languages.
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Our thoughts and our feelings, of course, are not wholly objective, they're inherently subjective. And that's the danger, and I think as long as we're aware of it and can push back against it, I don't think that these two views are necessarily incompatible.
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I do read a lot, and I think in recent years the ratio between the amount of non-fiction and fiction has tipped quite considerably. I did read fiction as a teenager as well, mostly because I was forced to read fiction, of course, to go through high school.
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Working with the doctors is a fascinating two-way process. I am interested in what they suggest about why I'm the way I am. But if they could make me 'normal', I wouldn't want that. I've been like this for so long, it's what makes me .
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My family supported me. I wasn't hot-housed at all as a young child; I didn't go to any kind of gifted school. They didn't exist in the very poor parts of England when I grew up in the 1980s. I had a great time to learn, had access to libraries and teachers who were patient and enthusiastic when I showed ability in some subjects.
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There is this mythology that says that when people are born, their brains are essentially fixed very early on and they're not able to change their connections. I was aware that was a myth and that people could learn new skills.
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Logic obviously is important. You need to be able to figure things out, to go to the end of a particular problem. But intuition is very important because it references things that logic alone cannot.
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Six is the hardest number for me to experience, the smallest. It's the absence of something - it's cold, dark, almost like a black hole. If someone tells me they are depressed, I might imagine myself in the hole of a six to help me empathise.
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Often autism is portrayed in the media as a very negative condition, as something that prevents somebody from communicating or from socializing or from being able to have any kind of normal, happy life.
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It was hard for me to find my voice because I was, for so long, absorbed in my own world.