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.

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

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.

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.

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

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

You don't have to be disabled to be different, because everybody's different.

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.

The human brain is like a memory system that records every thing that happens to us and makes intelligent predictions based on those experiences.

I changed my name because it didn't fit with the way I saw myself.

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.

We are born into this precious human existence to achieve the uni cation of opposites and become enlightened, or liberated, from the illusion of separation.

You can't muffle a real good time.

Men create gods after their own image, not only with regard to their form but with regard to their mode of life.

Presidents should not be exempted from the same standards of reason and evidence and justification that any other citizen or civil movement should be held to.

A man's enemies have no power to harm him, if he is true to himself and loyal to God.

I realized that was what was happening in my work already. I think that's where, as artists, we begin to master our craft: when we're able to step back and understand things.

I feel very privileged that I get to spend my life telling stories that mean something to people.

Some miners would have 20 pints after a hard day in the mine. Now that we sit behind computers all day, this is down to 18 or 19 pints.

I love meeting life halfway.

I want to feel that every trip I make has enhanced me as a person.