Top 30 Daniel Tammet Quotes

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.

Squaring numbers is a symmetrical process that I like very much. And when I divide one number by another, say, 13 divided by 97, I see a spiral rotating downwards in larger and larger loops that seem to warp and curve. The shapes coalesce into the right number. I never write anything down.

I found maths very easy, but I still enjoyed discovering things. You have to have the necessary information. For example, what’s the difference between the mean and the median? Probability fascinated me. You have to think very carefully about things, which is the way my mind works anyway.

Even the greatest mathematicians, the ones that we would put into our mythology of great mathematicians, had to do a great deal of leg work in order to get to the solution in the end.

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.

I certainly have routines in my day-to-day life that are important to me and still give me feelings of security and control, but the capacity to break out of them every so often as I travel has given me a second wind.

Every culture has contributed to maths just as it has contributed to literature. It’s a universal language; numbers belong to everyone.

I would play with numbers in a way that other kids would play with their friends.

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.

I’ve got a quiet voice. I think it’s because as a child I didn’t speak very much. I used to put my fingers in my ears to feel the silence, which was like a lovely trickling motion in my head.

I was incredibly lucky that my first book found a large and loyal readership. It changed my life – from being a very withdrawn adult to living in Paris as a full-time writer. It has also given me enormous confidence.

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.

I’m not sure I’m the only savant with high IQ or with an above average IQ. Again, it may just be that we don’t know very many of the others.

When I achieved the European record for reciting pi in 2004, this captured the imagination of Professor Simon Baron-Cohen in Cambridge, and he finally diagnosed me with Asperger’s that year.

I think if I ever stopped pushing myself, I would revert quickly to quite repetitive, restrictive behaviour. But in pushing myself and concentrating on what I can do, I think I can contribute to society. And that gives me the desire to keep pushing, to see what I’m capable of. The thing to do is not to stop.

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.

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.

I know from my own experience that there is much more to ‘intelligence’ than an IQ number. In fact, I hesitate to believe that any system could really reflect the complexity and uniqueness of one person’s mind, or meaningfully describe the nature of his or her potential.

I feel traveling certainly does broaden the mind. In my case certainly I feel more confident. It gives you a new perspective on the world.

Fischer, the great American chess champion, famously said, ‘Chess is life.’ I would say, ‘Pi is life.’

I recited Pi to 22,514 decimal points in five hours and nine minutes. I was able to do this because of weeks of study, aided by the unusual synaesthesic way my mind perceives numbers as complex multidimensional coloured and textured shapes.

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.

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 .

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.

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.

My first memory – at about four – was of numbers. The doctors who study me think a combination of mild autism and seizures I had when I was three have made me experience numbers the way I do.

We will always have more to discover, more to invent, more to understand and that’s much closer to art and literature than any science.

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.

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.

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.