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A Quotes

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All A Quotes

“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.”

“Autism is a neurological disorder. It's not caused by bad parenting. It's caused by, you know, abnormal development in the brain. The emotional circuits in the brain are abnormal. And there also are differences in the white matter, which is the brain's computer cables that hook up the different brain departments.”

“Autism isn't something a person has, or a shell that a person is trapped inside. There's no normal child hidden behind the autism. Autism is a way of being. It is pervasive; it colors every experience, every sensation, perception, thought, emotion and encounter - every aspect of existence. It is not possible to separate the autism from the person – and if it were possible, the person you'd have left would not be the same person you started with.”

“Autism reaches out in many different directions. It can be associated with language delays. It can be associated with epilepsy. It can be associated with some degree of intellectual disability, but the two core features of autism, I see, is impairments and social cognition, understanding and in restricted interests and repetitive behaviors.”

“Autistic savants tend to have left-brain dysfunction coupled with right-brain compensation, and this has led numerous research groups to wonder if sabotaging a portion of the left brain might grant savant-like abilities. Numerous experimenters, but most especially neurobiologist Allan Snyder at the University of Sydney in Australia, have used magnetic pulses to temporarily disable the left anterior temporal lobe of the brain in ordinary people before giving them specific tasks.8 In one case, participants were given a minute to draw a horse, dog, or face. In others, they were given challenging proofreading or number-estimation tasks after being exposed to the magnetic pulse. In all experiments, a portion of the participants showed dramatic improvements.9 After one drawing experiment, one man could not believe that the highly accurate drawings were his own. Yet the effects were not universal; savantlike skills were not induced in everyone. Nobody knows why. That’s obviously worth looking into, but even more intriguing is what happens to these superhuman abilities when autism is ultimately cured.”

“Auto da Fay reveals the trickles of a creative sensibility that later became a tide, but essentially, Weldon the writer emerges only at the very end of this volume, in conjunction with her finding and marrying her husband of 30 years, Ron Weldon. In this sense, it is half a memoir, the private background story to the public future. (...) The reader is forced to re-evaluate the spectacular weirdness of Weldon's fiction: having lived such a life any other kind would seem insipid.”

“Auto repair, piloting, skiing, perhaps even management: these are skills that yield to application, hard work, and native talent. But forecasting an uncertain future and deciding the best course of action in the face of that future are much less likely to do so. And much of what we've seen so far suggests that a large group of diverse individuals will come up with better and more robust forecasts and make more intelligent decisions than even the most skilled "decision maker."”

“Autobiographical writing stands as lasting memorial for enduring the travails of an earthly life. Writing is an apt technique to score our storyline into the annuals of time. To endure a mortal life is merely a transitory experience whereas writing about how one lived is an internalized exposition of what it means to be human. Writing is an external exhibition injecting the author into the world’s consciousness.”

“Autobiographical writings, essays, interviews, various other things... All the non-fiction prose I wanted to keep, that was the idea behind this collected volume, which came out about few years ago. I didn't think of Winter Journal, for example, as an autobiography, or a memoir. What it is is a literary work, composed of autobiographical fragments, but trying to attain, I hope, the effect of music.”