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The Great Gatsby
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The Great Gatsby
Hamlet

Daniel Tammet Quotes

Someone who copies a Van Gogh does not therefore become Van Gogh, and the same would go for Mozart or anyone else who contributed something that was original. Certainly in the way that I described visualizing numbers in abstract, meaningful shapes.

– 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

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.

– 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

Growing up, I would have to watch the other children and learn from my mistakes. I would have to push myself to overcome the things most people don’t have to think about. Brushing my teeth was very difficult because of the noise of the brush.

– Daniel Tammet

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

– Daniel Tammet

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.

– 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’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.

– Daniel Tammet

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.

– Daniel Tammet

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.

– Daniel Tammet

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.

– Daniel Tammet

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.

– Daniel Tammet

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.

– Daniel Tammet

There are estimated to be fewer that 50 prodigious savants worldwide. If we were brought together, it would be disappointing in the sense of us having different abilities. One thing that would make me feel united with them would be the sense of us having grown up in isolation.

– Daniel Tammet

Reading and discovering fiction has taught me how to empathise, understand falling in love and all those complex relationships that people have to deal with.

– Daniel Tammet

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.

– 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.

– Daniel Tammet

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.

– 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

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

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.

– Daniel Tammet

My autism is a very mild form. It was diagnosed at the age of 25, partly because it wasn’t diagnosable as a teenager (this is Asperger’s syndrome, specifically). But there were certainly traits within that condition, within the autism spectrum in general, especially at the high functioning end, that I think are best looked at as pluses.

– 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

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

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

It was hard for me to find my voice because I was, for so long, absorbed in my own world.

– 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

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.

– Daniel Tammet

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