Daniel Tammet

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.

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.

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

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.

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

Six is the hardest number for me to experience, the smallest. It's the absence of something - it's cold, dark, almost like a black hole. If someone tells me they are depressed, I might imagine myself in the hole of a six to help me empathise.

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!

ur is a shy number.

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 the way I do.

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.

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.

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