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.

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.

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.

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.

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.

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.

One particular aspect of Siddhartha’s revelation of the outside world has always struck me. Quite possibly he lived his first thirty years without any knowledge of number. How must he have felt, then, to see crowds of people mingling in the streets? Before that day he would not have believed that so many people existed in all the world. And what wonder it must have been to discover flocks of birds, and piles of stones, leaves on trees and blades of grass! To suddenly realise that, his whole life long, he had been kept at arm’s length from multiplicity.