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 TammetI 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 TammetIt was hard for me to find my voice because I was, for so long, absorbed in my own world.
Daniel TammetOne particular aspect of Siddharthaโs 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 armโs length from multiplicity.
Daniel TammetI love music. I have a fondness for Chopin, and I very much like his 'Raindrop Prelude.'
Daniel TammetI remember as a young child, during one of my frequent trips to the local library, spending hours looking at book after book trying in vain to find one that had my name on it. Because there were so many books in the library, with so many different names on them, Iโd assumed that one of them โ somewhere โ had to be mine. I didnโt understand at the time that a personโs name appears on a book because he or she wrote it. Now that Iโm twenty-six I know better. If I were ever going to find my book one day, I was going to have to write it.
Daniel Tammet