Quotes from Temple Grandin

People are always looking for the single magic bullet that will totally change everything. There is no single magic bullet.

I was so afraid to go out west to my aunt's ranch. But the only choice my mother gave me was to go for two weeks or all summer. I wound up staying all summer. And that's where I learned about cattle. I could relate to their behavior, their fears.

I am much less autistic now, compared to when I was young. I remember some behaviors like picking carpet fuzz and watching spinning plates for hours. I didn't want to be touched. I couldn't shut out background noise. I didn't talk until I was about 4 years old. I screamed. I hummed. But as I grew up, I improved.

It's very important for the parents of young autistic children to encourage them to talk, or for those that don't talk, to give them a way of communicating, like a picture board, where they can point to a glass of milk, or a jacket if they're cold, or the bathroom. If they want something, then they need to learn to request that thing.

Research has shown that a barren environment is much more damaging to baby animals than it is to adult animals. It does not hurt the adult animals the same way it damages babies.

What I've tried to do is combine both my personal experiences with scientific research. I like to cross the divide between the personal world and the scientific world.

I am a big believer in early intervention.

Bad things always happen when an animal is overselected for any single trait. Nature will give you a nasty surprise.

In dealing with autism, I'm certainly not saying we should lose sight of the need to work on deficits, But the focus on deficits is so intense and so automatic that people lose sight of the strengths.

It's OK to be an eccentric; it's not OK to be a rude and dirty eccentric.

The Internet may be the best thing yet for improving an autistic person's social life.

There's a point where anecdotal evidence becomes truth

I replaced emotional complexity with visual and intellectual complexity. I questioned everything and looked to logic, science, and intellect for answers.

I get great satisfaction out of doing clever things with my mind, but I don't know what it is like to feel rapturous joy.

Label-locked thinking can affect treatment. For instance, I heard a doctor say about a kid with gastrointestinal issues, "Oh, he has autism. That's the problem"—and then he didn't treat the GI problem.

Teachers who work with autistic children need to understand associative thought patterns.

Boys who cry can work for Google. Boys who trash computers cannot. I once was at a science conference, and I saw a NASA scientist who had just found out that his project was canceled—a project he'd worked on for years. He was maybe sixty-five years old, and you know what? He was crying. And I thought, Good for him. That's why he was able to reach retirement age working in a job he loved.

What a horse does under compulsion he does blindly, and his performance is no more beautiful than would be that of a ballet-dancer taught by whip and goad. The performances of horse or man so treated would seem to be displays of clumsy gestures rather than of grace and beauty. What we need is that the horse should of his own accord exhibit his finest airs and paces at set signals.

When something is all in your mind, people tend to think that it's willful, that it's something you could control if only you tried harder or if you had been trained differently. I'm hoping that the newfound certainty that autism is in your brain and in your genes will affect public attitudes.

Neuroanatomy isn't destiny. Neither is genetics. They don't define who you will be. But they do define who you might be. They define who you can be.

The easiest words for an autistic child to learn are nouns, because they directly relate to pictures. Highly verbal autistic children like I was can sometimes learn how to read with phonics. Written words were too abstract for me to remember, but I could laboriously remember the approximately fifty phonetic sounds and a few rules.

It is human nature to strive.

Neurotypical people seem to think and feel that it's okay to be rigid as long as their ideas are shared by enough people.

Many autistic children like to smell things, and smell may provide more reliable information about their surroundings than either vision or hearing.