Temple Grandin Quotes

The thing is, autism is all different, you know, variables. And you start out with a certain amount of, you know, the point where the differences in the brain are going to just be a personality variant and, like, for very mild Asperger's. But you get into more severe kinds of autism where there's obvious speech delay, obvious abnormal behavior in a two and three-year-old child, you know, the initial neurology is different from case to case. But all children with autism are going to do better if they get really good educational intervention.

If by some magic, autism had been eradicated from the face of the Earth, then men would still be socializing in front of a wood fire at the entrance to a cave.

I have a condition called Aspergers Syndrome, which is like a mild form of autism It means I don't interact properly in certain social situations.

I did want to acknowledge and confirm the fact that my son does, indeed, have an autism diagnosis.

Autism does exist on a spectrum, and there are so many manifestations of it, so many kinds of expressions of it. And every case is particular.

My heart bleeds, goes out for families with kids with autism.

My heart goes out to kids with autism.

By looking at autistic kids, you can't tell when you're working with them who you're going to pull out, who is going to become verbal and who's not. And there seem to be certain kids who, as they learn more and more, they get less autistic acting, and they learn social skills enough so that they can turn out socially normal.

I think the mild Aspergers have always been there. You see, Asperger's diagnosis did not become common in the U.S. until the early '90s. And an Aspergers has more or less normal speech development and they've always been here, that hasn't changed. I can think back to when I was in high school, this is 40 years ago, I could name kids in my high school class and college class that, today, would be diagnosed as Aspergers.

People with autism aren't interested in social chit-chat.

I think that the definition of autism is too broad. You got to remember, autism definition is a behavioral profiling.

It is never too late to expand the mind of a person on the autism spectrum.

A person with autism lives in his own world, while a person with Asperger's lives in our world, in a way of his own choosing

I think a brain can be made "more thinking" or made "more emotional." At what point does this become abnormal? Autism in its milder variants, I think, is part of normal human variation.

The thing is, autism is a big spectrum. Going from folks who remain nonverbal, all the way up to, ya know, famous scientists and musicians. And we've got to work on strengths. We also have to work on teaching basic manners and skills.

Autism's a very big spectrum. At one end of the spectrum, Einstein would probably be labeled autistic, Steve Jobs, half of Silicon Valley, you know, Van Gogh. And at the other end of the spectrum, you got much more severe handicaps where they never learn to speak.

In fact, when we as neuro-typical people encounter a person with autism spectrum syndrome who's always been that way it is that we have to adjust. Just because we can read people with autism correctly, whatever that word is why do we always default to saying, 'Well, that kid is not normal?' What is normal?

There's a saying within the Asperger community: if you've met one person with Asperger's syndrome, you've met one person with Asperger's syndrome ... Within this condition, beneath this label, the variety of personality, of humor, of behavior, is infinite.

Autism is a big continuum, going from someone who remains nonverbal, all the way up to geniuses on Silicon Valley. And some kids are visual thinkers like me. Other kids are pattern thinkers - your mathematicians, your programmers. And there are others, they are word thinkers. Uneven skills. You need to take the thing that they're good at and you need to work on developing it.

Kids made fun of me because I was dark skinned, had a wide nose, and was dyslexic. Even as an actor, it took me a long time to realize why words and letters got jumbled in my mind and came out differently.

I was adored [as a kid]. I was always in the air, hurled up and kissed and thrown in the air again. Until I was six, my feet didn't touch the ground. "Look at those eyes! That nose! Those lips! That tooth! Get that child away from me, quick! I'll eat him!" Giving that up was very difficult later on in life.

Thank God that Bumble-Ardy's parents are dead so we don't have to wonder what they did to him. We only know that they were famous, and famous people have unhappy children for the most part. They don't have the time to take care of them. So he's a troubled pig-boy, a kid you've got to watch.

A lot of the hallmark behaviors of autism - flat affect, stimming, not looking someone in the eye - could very easily be misinterpreted as signs of guilt.

Social thinking skills must be directly taught to children and adults with ASD. Doing so opens doors of social understandings in all areas of life.

One of the best investments we can make is to give our kids the ingredients they need to develop in the first five years of life.