Temple Grandin

“You have got to keep autistic children engaged with the world. You cannot let them tune out.”

“I've worked with tons of people that I know who are on the spectrum - but now I think severe autism has really increased.”

“Children between the ages of five to ten years are even more variable. They are going to vary from very high functioning, capable of doing normal school work, to nonverbal who have all kinds of neurological problems.”

“When you take a drug to treat high blood pressure or diabetes, you have an objective test to measure blood pressure and the amount of sugar in the blood. It is straight-forward. With autism, you are looking for changes in behavior.”

“The world needs all types of minds.”

“My life is basically my work.”

“Let's get into talking about how autism is similar animal behavior. The thing is I don't think in a language, and animals don't think in a language. It's sensory based thinking, thinking in pictures, thinking in smells, thinking in touches. It's putting these sensory based memories into categories.”

“Some teachers just have a knack for working with autistic children. Other teachers do not have it.”

“One of my sensory problems was hearing sensitivity, where certain loud noises, such as a school bell, hurt my ears. It sounded like a dentist drill going through my ears.”

“The thing about being autistic is that you gradually get less and less autistic, because you keep learning, you keep learning how to behave. It's like being in a play; I'm always in a play.”

“I'm a visual thinker, really bad at algebra. There's others that are a pattern thinker. These are the music and math minds. They think in patterns instead of pictures. Then there's another type that's not a visual thinker at all, and they're the ones that memorize all of the sports statistics, all of the weather statistics.”

“When I was in high school and college, I thought everybody could think in pictures. And my first inkling to my thinking was even different was when I was in college and I read an article about, you know, some scientist said that the caveman could not have designed tools until they had language.”

“Computerized medical records will enable statistical analysis to be used to determine which treatments are most effective.”

“If I did not have my work, I would not have any life.”

“When I was younger, I was looking for this magic meaning of life.”

“It's much more work for the mother of an autistic child to have a job, because working with an autistic child is such a hassle until they go to school.”

“A treatment method or an educational method that will work for one child may not work for another child. The one common denominator for all of the young children is that early intervention does work, and it seems to improve the prognosis.”

“I am a big believer in early intervention.”

“My grandfather was an engineer who invented the automatic pilot for airplanes.”

“I would never talk just to be social. Now, to sit down with a bunch of engineers and talk about the latest concrete forming systems, that's really interesting. Talking with animal behaviorists or with someone who likes to sail, that's interesting. Information is interesting to me. But talking for the sake of talking, I find that quite boring.”