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. – 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 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
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
Of course creativity is a mystery. We don’t know what drives it or what constitutes it. It’s one of those things, like genius, you know it when you see it but it’s impossible to define. – Daniel Tammet
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. – Daniel Tammet
What I do find surprising is that other people do not think in the same way. I find it hard to imagine a world where numbers and words are not how I experience them! – 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
I’m very comfortable with the idea of there being late bloomers, and for me, of course, there’s no difficulty at all in the way that I think of talent and achievement and so on. – 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
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 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. – Daniel Tammet
In my mind, numbers and words are far more than squiggles of ink on a page. They have form, color, texture and so on. They come alive to me, which is why as a young child I thought of them as my ‘friends.’ – Daniel Tammet
I love music. I have a fondness for Chopin, and I very much like his ‘Raindrop Prelude.’ – Daniel Tammet
There is no such thing as an average person. They really are guidelines for people to grapple with the unknown, and we can always surprise expectations. – Daniel Tammet
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. – Daniel Tammet
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. – Daniel Tammet
My mother is not a model. She is not perfect. That awareness is part of learning to love someone. Predicting the actions of someone is an act of love. We persist, even when we get it wrong. That’s the beauty of love. – Daniel Tammet
Fischer, the great American chess champion, famously said, ‘Chess is life.’ I would say, ‘Pi is life.’ – 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 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. – Daniel Tammet
