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."

"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."

"If when we are taught English we are just taught the rules of grammar, it would take all our love of our language away from us. What makes us love a subject like English is when we learn all these fantastic stories. Feeding the imagination is what makes a subject come alive."

"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."

"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."

"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."

"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."

"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."

"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."

"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."

"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."