Quotes from Daniel Tammet

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 It changed my life - from being a very withdrawn adult to living in Paris as a full-time writer.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.

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.

It was a gradual process, realising I was different. I remember at primary school getting a worksheet with sums printed on it. I thought that they must have run out of the right colour inks and sizes for the numbers, because they were all the same, which isn't how I experienced numbers at all. To me, nine is big and blue.

Language evolves in such a way that sounds correspond with … the personal, intuitive experience of the listener.

Aesthetic judgments, rather than abstract reasoning, guide and shape the process by which we all come to know what we know.

No relationship is without its difficulties and this is certainly true when one or both of the persons involved has an autistic spectrum disorder. Even so, I believe what is truly essential to the success of any relationship is not so much compatibility, but love. When you love someone, virtually anything is possible.

Why learn a number like pi to so many decimal places? The answer I gave then as I do now is that pi is for me an extremely beautiful and utterly unique thing. Like the Mona Lisa or a Mozart symphony, pi is its own reason for loving it.

A bell cannot tell time, but it can be moved in just such a way as to say twelve o'clock – similarly, a man cannot calculate infinite numbers, but he can be moved in just such a way as to say pi.

The human brain is like a memory system that records every thing that happens to us and makes intelligent predictions based on those experiences.

I thought of the infinitely many points that can divide the space between two human hearts.

I had eventually come to understand that friendship was a delicate, gradual process that mustn't be rushed or seized upon but allowed and encouraged to take its course over time. I pictured it as a butterfly, simultaneously beautiful and fragile, that once afloat belonged to the air and any attempt to grab at it would only destroy it.

What would it be like, a world without snow? I cannot imagine such a place. It would be like a world devoid of numbers. Every snowflake, unique as every number, tells us something about complexity. Perhaps that is why we will never tire of its wonder.

We know next to nothing with any certainty about Pythagoras, except that he was not really called Pythagoras. The name by which he is known to us was probably a nickname bestowed by his followers. According to one source, it meant 'He who spoke truth like an oracle'. Rather than entrust his mathematical and philosophical ideas to paper, Pythagoras is said to have expounded them before large crowds. The world's most famous mathematician was also its first rhetorician.

like literary fiction, mathematical imagination entertains pure possibilities.

Change appears to us mysterious because it is invisible. It is impossible to see a tree grow tall or a man grow old, except with the precarious imagination of hindsight. A tree is small, and later it is tall. A man is young, and later he is old. A people are at peace, and later they are at war. In each case, the intermediate states are at once infinitely many and infinitely complex, which is why they exceed our finite perceptions.

Clouds and buttercups exist in poetry, but they are there only because storms and flowers populate the world too.

Perhaps talk of counters turned the boy's thoughts to his father's glove shop. His father would have accounted for all his transactions using the tokens. They were hard and round and very thin, made of copper or brass. There were counters for one pair of gloves, and for two pairs, and three and four and five. But there was no counter for zero. No counters existed for all the sales that his father did not close.

Like many parents, they equated normality with being happy and productive.

Gottfried Leibniz wrote that music's pleasure consisted of "unconscious counting" or an "arithmetical exercise of which we are unaware.

I hate textbooks. I hate how they shoehorn even the most incongruous words – like 'cup' and 'bookcase,' or 'pencil' and 'ashtray' – onto the same page, and then call it 'vocabulary.' In a conversation, the language is always fluid, moving, and you have to move with it. You walk and talk and see where the words come from, and where they should go. It was in this way that I learned to count like a Viking.

If a man receives thirteen coins, he will hanker after sixteen, and possessing them he considers life unbearable unless he now earns forty. Nature, it might be observed, imposes strict boundaries on a person's height and age span, so that in even the most extreme instances no one can rise or fall too far or too short from the rest, whereas no such boundary inhibits money.

always felt them to be something to cope and contend with, to navigate around, rather than as individuals to get to know and to play with.

I sat still, my head down, staring at a spot between the numbered tiles. I could feel his inquisitive brown eyes on me. Finally, I shrugged and said, 'I don't know.

G. K. Chesterton, an English journalist who wrote extensively about his Christian beliefs in the early part of the twentieth