Daniel Tammet Quotes

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Daniel Tammet

Profession : Writer

Birth : January 31, 1979

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.

Daniel Tammet

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.

Daniel Tammet

If when we are taught English we are just taught the rules of grammar, it would take all our love of our language away from us. What makes us love a subject like English is when we learn all these fantastic stories. Feeding the imagination is what makes a subject come alive.

Daniel Tammet

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.

Daniel Tammet

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.

Daniel Tammet

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.

Daniel Tammet

I love music. I have a fondness for Chopin, and I very much like his 'Raindrop Prelude.'

Daniel Tammet

There are always things I find difficult - being in crowds, remembering faces. I do like routines. I always travel with someone. My life in Avignon is a very quiet one. I have an apartment that looks over the whole city. I can drop into town, but a lot of the time I write from home. In some respects I still live a very quiet, simple life.

Daniel Tammet

I have never played the lottery in my life and never will. Voltaire described lotteries as a tax on stupidity. More specifically, I think, on innumeracy.

Daniel Tammet

Life is going to be complex, and the only way we're able navigate our way through it at all is by living as best we can and absorbing those experiences and somehow making intuitive responses in future situations that resemble them in some way.

Daniel Tammet

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.

Daniel Tammet

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.

Daniel Tammet

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.

Daniel Tammet

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.

Daniel Tammet

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.

Daniel Tammet

I consider social skills a bit like learning a language. I've been practising it for so long over so many years I've almost lost my accent.

Daniel Tammet

When I multiply numbers together, I see two shapes. The image starts to change and evolve, and a third shape emerges. That's the answer. It's mental imagery. It's like maths without having to think.

Daniel Tammet

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.

Daniel Tammet

Retaining a sense of control is really important. I like to do things in my own time, and in my own style, so an office with targets and bureaucracy just wouldn't work.

Daniel Tammet

I love books so much. I've read more books than anyone else I know.

Daniel Tammet