“When we pulled in, the customs officer looked in the back. The back of the wagon was filled with cases stenciled PINK FLOYD--LONDON.'Got Pink Floyd in the back of the car, do you?' he asked.'Righto, mate. We shrunk 'em and stuck 'em in fookin' boxes, we did,' said Nigel.Amazingly, the customs officer laughed and waved us through.”

“Last summer, when he thought I wasn't looking, I observed Cubby telling one of the neighborhood six-year-olds that there were dragons living in the storm drains, under our street.'We feed them meat...and then they don't get hungry and blow fire and roast us.'Little James listened closely, with a very serious expression on his face. Then he ran home to get some hot dogs from his mother.”

“Soon I was spending all my time in the basement, and I had moved from taking things apart to putting new things together. I began by building simple devices. Some, like my radios, were useful. Others were merely entertaining. For example, I discovered I could solder some stiff wires onto a capacitor and charge it up. For a few minutes, until the charge leaked away, I had a crude stun gun....So I decided to try it on my little brother. I charged the capacitor to a snappy but nonlethal level from a power supply I'd recently removed from our old Zenith television.'Hey, let's play Jab a Varmint,' I said. I tried to smile disarmingly, keeping the capacitor behind my back and making sure I didn't ruin the effect by jabbing myself or some other object.'What's that?' he asked, suspiciously.Before he could escape, I stepped across the room and jabbed him. He jumped. Pretty high, too. Sometimes he would fight back, but this time he ran. The jab was totally unexpected and he didn't realize that I only had the one jab in my capacitor. It would be several years before I had the skill to make a multishot Varmint Jabber.”

“And now I know it is perfectly natural for me not to look at someone when I talk. Those of us with Asperger's are just not comfortable doing it. In fact, I don'treally understand why it's considered normal to stare at someone's eyeballs.”

“We began reading books together. He loved Dr. Seuss. I read those books so often I could turn the pages and say the words from memory. I became bored with repetition, and I began to make subtle alterations. The story turned into:One fishTwo fishBlack fishBlue fishI eat you fishAnd:See them allSee them runThe man in backHe has a gun”

“It does not matter what sixty-six percent of people do in any particular situation. All that matters is what you do.”

“In the past, when people criticized me for asking unexpected questions, I felt ashamed. Now I realize that normal people are acting in a superficial and often false manner. So rather than let them make me feel bad, I express my annoyance. It's my way of trying to strike a blow for logic and rationality.”