98 Quotes by 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.

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.

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.

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.

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.

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.

Every culture has contributed to maths just as it has contributed to literature. It’s a universal language; numbers belong to everyone.

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

You don’t have to be disabled to be different, because everybody’s different.