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...

When I multiply numbers together, I see two shapes. The image starts to change and evolve, and a third shape emerges. That’s the answer. It’s mental imagery. It’s like maths without having to think.

I love music. I have a fondness for Chopin, and I very much like his ‘Raindrop Prelude.’

We will always have more to discover, more to invent, more to understand and that’s much closer to art and literature than any science.

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...

The way that I approached numbers, think about them, the same as for language as well-acquiring vocabulary, understanding the grammar, the structures of languages, the rhythm, the music and so-on – these things obviously evolved.

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...

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...

It was hard for me to find my voice because I was, for so long, absorbed in my own world.

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...

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...

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!

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 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...

My autism is a very mild form. It was diagnosed at the age of 25, partly because it wasn’t diagnosable as a teenager (this is Asperger’s syndrome, specifically). But there were certainly traits within that...

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.

I was incredibly lucky that my first book found a large and loyal readership. It changed my life – from being a very withdrawn adult to living in Paris as a full-time writer. It has...

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.

Logic obviously is important. You need to be able to figure things out, to go to the end of a particular problem. But intuition is very important because it references things that logic alone cannot.

I think if I ever stopped pushing myself, I would revert quickly to quite repetitive, restrictive behaviour. But in pushing myself and concentrating on what I can do, I think I can contribute to society....

There are estimated to be fewer that 50 prodigious savants worldwide. If we were brought together, it would be disappointing in the sense of us having different abilities. One thing that would make me feel...

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...

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.

Working with the doctors is a fascinating two-way process. I am interested in what they suggest about why I’m the way I am. But if they could make me ‘normal’, I wouldn’t want that. I’ve...

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

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...

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.

I found maths very easy, but I still enjoyed discovering things. You have to have the necessary information. For example, what’s the difference between the mean and the median? Probability fascinated me. You have to...

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...

Perhaps talk of counters turned the boy’s thoughts to his father’s glove shop. His father would have accounted for all his transactions using the tokens. They were hard and round and very thin, made of...

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...

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...

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.

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...

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.

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.

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.

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...

My family supported me. I wasn’t hot-housed at all as a young child; I didn’t go to any kind of gifted school. They didn’t exist in the very poor parts of England when I grew...

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...

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.

Fischer, the great American chess champion, famously said, ‘Chess is life.’ I would say, ‘Pi is life.’

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...

My first memory – at about four – was of numbers. The doctors who study me think a combination of mild autism and seizures I had when I was three have made me experience numbers...

Squaring numbers is a symmetrical process that I like very much. And when I divide one number by another, say, 13 divided by 97, I see a spiral rotating downwards in larger and larger loops...

I have never played the lottery in my life and never will. Voltaire described lotteries as a tax on stupidity. More specifically, I think, on innumeracy.

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.

Reading and discovering fiction has taught me how to empathise, understand falling in love and all those complex relationships that people have to deal with.

One of the lines from my books is about having respect for different minds, and if I had to have an epitaph at this point in my life, that would be it.

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.