Neil Peart Quotes

#1. I had come to appreciate the long open stretches of two-lane highway across the sagey sea and mountain-studded plateau of the Great Basin, but the towns and cities were another thing. I liked the natural face of Nevada, but was not as impressed by the human face.

Neil Peart

#2. You can twist perception
reality wont budge
you can raise objection
I won2t be judge and jury

Neil Peart

#3. I still totally believe in individual rights and individual responsibility and in choosing to do good.

Neil Peart

#4. If drummers are 'anti-solo,' that's up to them. They're musicians, and they can play whatever they want. But my inspirations early on were people like Buddy Rich, seeing him on 'The Tonight Show', or Gene Krupa.

Neil Peart

#5. Now I call myself a bleeding heart libertarian. Because I do believe in the principles of Libertarianism as an ideal - because I'm an idealist.

Neil Peart

#6. I had spindly little ankles, and growing up in Canada, I couldn't skate. I was no good at any sports so was very much a pariah through those adolescent years.

Neil Peart

#7. All this machinery making modern music can still be open-hearted. Not so boldly charted, it's really just a question of your honesty.

Neil Peart

#8. You can surrender without a prayer, but never really pray without surrender. You can fight without ever winning, but never ever win without a fight.

Neil Peart

#9. To get nostalgic about other people's music, or even about your own, makes a terrible statement about the condition of your life and your prospects for the future. I have no patience with that kind of attitude, whether it's on radio or among friends.

Neil Peart

#10. Hay farms, scrub forest, and some bald-looking areas of

Neil Peart

#11. I even felt a vicarious guilt, like a German meeting Jewish people in Poland who had never heard of the Holocaust, or that there were Jews in America, and trying to explain it to them. Ashea, I wished I could say. Ashea.

Neil Peart

#12. It's always a happy day when YYZ appears on our luggage tags.

Neil Peart

#13. The important thing is: if you fail once, or if your luck is bad this time, the dream is still there. A dream is only over if you give it up-or if it comes true.

Neil Peart

#14. Don't try to change Doofus, let Doofus change you.

Neil Peart

#15. For me, drum elements are like hieroglyphics - I think of a certain physical figure, and a little three-dimensional glyph will appear in my mind as I'm playing.

Neil Peart

#16. I'd be very honored to be the ambassador to drum solos.

Neil Peart

#17. From first to last, the peak is never passed. Something always fires the light that gets in your eyes.

Neil Peart

#18. Throw off those chains of reason and your prison disappears.

Neil Peart

#19. I remain the optimist: you just do your best and hope for the best. But it's an evolving state of mind.

Neil Peart

#20. Only a mediocre man is always at his best,

Neil Peart

#21. It is impossible to follow the teachings of Jesus Christ and be a Republican. It's philosophically absolutely opposed - if they could only think about what they were saying for a minute. That's when you get caught up in the webs of what people call themselves and how they behave.

Neil Peart

#22. One likes to believe in the freedom of music.

Neil Peart

#23. Adventures suck when you're having them.

Neil Peart

#24. All four winds together can't bring the world to me Shadows cast a play of light, so much I want to see Chase the sun around the world, I want to look at life-In the Available Light. I'll go with the wind, I'll stand in the light.

Neil Peart

#25. It seems to me that's the only way you can have a truly creative aggregate of people is if they're all contributing in different ways.

Neil Peart

#26. How can anybody be enlightened?
Truth is after all so poorly lit

Neil Peart

#27. More a paraphrase than a quote, really, but it comes from a prayer which was stitched into a sampler above my grandmother's bed. It began like this: 'Now I lay me down to sleep, I pray the Lord my soul to keep ... '

Neil Peart

#28. For a person of my sensibility, you're only left with the Democratic party.

Neil Peart

#29. I try not to repeat myself in fills in all the Rush songs unless it is something simple or something I feel is my own characteristic thing.

Neil Peart

#30. Rudimental snare work is something I've always loved.

Neil Peart

#31. Getting through Lake Tahoe was already like L.A., with construction all over the place,

Neil Peart

#32. But glittering prizes and endless compromises shatter the illusion of integrity.

Neil Peart

#33. The thing for me about Ayn Rand is that her philosophy is the only one applicable to the world today - in every sense. If you take her ideas, then take them farther in your own mind, you can find answers to pretty well everything on an individual basis.

Neil Peart

#34. Do yourself a favor. Don't ever say to me, 'Everything happens for a reason.'

Neil Peart

#35. What is a master but a master student? And if that's true, then there's a responsibility on you to keep getting better and to explore avenues of your profession.

Neil Peart

#36. Dedicated to the future, with honor to the past.

Neil Peart

#37. I think everything I do has Howard Roark [hero of The Fountainhead] in it, you know, as much as anything. The person I write for is Howard Roark.

Neil Peart

#38. People don't realize the limitations of 200 words, and the way they get chiselled down into a song that has to be sung.

Neil Peart

#39. Too much attention and hoopla doesn't agree with my temperament.

Neil Peart

#40. In 2007, I studied with Peter Erskine because I was doing a Buddy Rich tribute concert, and I wanted to take my big-band drumming up a level. I went over to Peter's house with my sticks, feeling like a 13-year-old again.

Neil Peart

#41. It was actually drumming that gave me the stamina to get into sports later. I started playing drums at 13, and when I got to the international touring level ... I got interested in cross-country skiing, long-distance swimming, bicycling ... things that require stamina, not finesse.

Neil Peart

#42. What a young musician's dream, to say, "Look at those chrome drums. Look at that 22-inch ride cymbal. I'll have those." It was one of those unparalleled exciting days of your life.

Neil Peart

#43. Geddy once joked, 'You're the only guy I know who rehearses to rehearse!

Neil Peart

#44. The government's only functions are to protect the rights of the individual; therefore, you need a police force and an army.

Neil Peart

#45. You just become adaptable and try to lead a good life in ways that make sense, regardless. Because I know at the end of it, if I'm going to meet Jesus or Allah or Buddha, I'm going to be all right.

Neil Peart

#46. Better the pride that resides as a citizen of the world than a pride that divides when a colorful rag is unfurled

Neil Peart

#47. Lessons taught but never learned, all around us anger burns. Guide the future by the past. Long ago the mould was cast.

Neil Peart

#48. There's still a lot I'm angry about, a lot of human behaviour that's appalling and despicable, but you choose what you can fight against. I always thought if I could just put something in words perfectly enough, people would get the idea and it would change things.

Neil Peart

#49. When I started playing, I played in R&B bands. I played James Brown, Wilson Pickett, Otis Redding and all that.

Neil Peart

#50. Courageous convictions will drag the dream into existence.

Neil Peart

#51. No one gets to their heaven without a fight.

Neil Peart

#52. Those who know what's best for us must rise and save us from ourselves.

Neil Peart

#53. Even as a kid, I never wanted to be famous; I wanted to be good.

Neil Peart

#54. And the men who hold high places must be the ones who start to mold a new reality closer to the heart.

Neil Peart

#55. Drumming completely eclipsed my life from age 13, when I started drum lessons. Everything disappeared. I'd done well in school up until that time. I was fairly adjusted socially up until that time. And I became completely monomania, obsessed all through my teens. Nothing else existed anymore.

Neil Peart

#56. Sometimes you're up against everybody in the whole world - even your friends and family are saying, "You need a single." You feel sometimes incredibly alone.

Neil Peart

#57. Let your heart be the anchor and the beat of your song.

Neil Peart

#58. The ones we wish could hear us have heard it all before.

Neil Peart

#59. I want to be an improviser, and I've worked very hard at that. It's an art. You don't just play whatever comes into your head; you have to be very deliberate about what you do.

Neil Peart

#60. When I'm riding my motorcycle, I'm glad to be alive. When I stop riding my motorcycle, I'm glad to be alive.

Neil Peart

#61. Howard Roark stood as a role model for me - as exactly the way I already was living. Even at that tender age [18] I already felt that. And it was intuitive or instinctive or inbred stubbornness or whatever; but I had already made those choices and suffered for them.

Neil Peart

#62. Live shows were always religion for us. We never played a show - whether it was in front of 15 people or 15,000 - where it wasn't everything we had that night.

Neil Peart

#63. You can do a lot in a lifetime, if you don't burn out too fast/You can make the most of the distance/First you need endurance/First you've got to last.

Neil Peart

#64. I'm learning all the time. I'm evolving all the time as a human being. I'm getting better, I hope, in all of the important ways.

Neil Peart

#65. Playing a three-hour Rush show is like running a marathon while solving equations.

Neil Peart

#66. Extroverts never understand introverts, and it was like that in school days. I read recently that all of us can be defined in adult life by the way others perceived us in high school.

Neil Peart

#67. The tarot card 'The Tower' seemed a chilling reflection of the events of September 11, 2001.

Neil Peart

#68. Your soul is stained with the blood of the innocent, feel their pain

Neil Peart

#69. To me, the highest expression of life is art with jokes. It's very rarified, very difficult to accomplish if you want to be more than just funny and more than just jokes about human gaseousness.

Neil Peart

#70. You can't get wise with sleep still in your eyes no matter what your dream might be.

Neil Peart

#71. The real test of a musician is live performance. It's one thing to spend a long time learning how to play well in the studio, but to do it in front of people is what keeps me coming back to touring.

Neil Peart

#72. Performing live in front of an audience is such a matter of will - all of those things you can do just fine in your basement, suddenly you have to do them in front of hundreds or thousands of people, and it becomes a different matter entirely.

Neil Peart

#73. If you want something done right, just forget it.

Neil Peart

#74. Look in, look the storm in the eye. Look out, to the sea and the sky. Look around, at the sight and sound. Look in, look out, look around.

Neil Peart

#75. As crises came up later on - "Oh, we have to compromise, and the record company wants to do this," I'd be like, "No, I don't have to."

Neil Peart

#76. Each of us, A CEll Of Awareness ... imperfect, and incomplete.
Genetic blends, with uncertain ends.

Neil Peart

#77. I sang the hymns, and I read the Bible stories, but I was always perplexed, like, 'Really? Jesus wants you for a sunbeam? For a what?'

Neil Peart

#78. I think, in music, you're always hoping that you'll have a like-minded audience and that the music you like making will appeal to them, too.

Neil Peart

#79. I am the audience. I want to observe people. Even when I'm playing drums onstage, I'm watching people. I'm looking at them and their faces and their T-shirts and their signs. And travelling by motorcycle, especially, the world is just coming at me.

Neil Peart

#80. Whatever is left behind in the passing of a rare talent, so much is always lost.

Neil Peart

#81. A spirit with a vision is a dream with a mission.

Neil Peart

#82. Could hell be a place where there is no self-respect? A place where people have no pride in their own existence or behavior, and thus would have none for anyone or anything else?

Neil Peart

#83. Stamina is the force that drives the drumming; it's not really a sprint.

Neil Peart

#84. When I was young, my ambitions were very modest. I thought, 'If only I could play at the battle of the bands at the Y, that would be the culmination of existence!' And then the roller rink, and you work your way up branch by branch.

Neil Peart

#85. Anytime I have an idea, I'll make sure that I put it down so that when we do sit down to write an album, I don't have to dream it all out of thin air. I don't have to be creative on the spur of the moment, or spontaneously artistic. I just take advantage of whenever creativity strikes.

Neil Peart

#86. If I have to travel, I'm going to travel my way and travel in the real world. And I'm going to have conversations every day with people in rest stops and people in gas stations and people in hotels and diners. That nourishes me.

Neil Peart

#87. The songs he chose reflected that same withdrawn, private man, but this man had the gift of expressing his inner soulscape through the medium of some of the 20th century's finest songwriters, from Rodgers and Hart to Antonio Carlos Jobim to Jimmy Webb, and as always, making those songs his own.

Neil Peart

#88. Live for yourself there's no one else more worth living for.

Neil Peart

#89. The Seven Cities of Gold always fascinated me. Southwestern U.S. history especially fascinates me. The whole spur of the Spanish exploration of the Southwestern U.S. was the search for these mythical Seven Cities of Gold.

Neil Peart

#90. Half the world hates
What half the world does every day
Half the world waits
While half gets on with it anyway

Neil Peart

#91. Racetracks are designed to make it as difficult as possible to get around that corner fast. And some ramps, by necessity, are that way, too.

Neil Peart

#92. I've heard the stories. Like, Eric Clapton said he wanted to burn his guitar when he heard Jimi Hendrix play. I never understood that because, when I went and saw a great drummer or heard one, all I wanted to do was practice.

Neil Peart

#93. If you choose not to decide you still have made a choice.

Neil Peart

#94. Ignorance and prejudice and fear go hand in hand

Neil Peart

#95. Quick to judge, quick to anger, slow to understand ... prejudice, fear and ignorance walk hand-in-hand.

Neil Peart

#96. For me to call myself a musician, it's necessary to play live, and it rewards so much - not just in the pay cheque sense but what it does for my playing. I feel it through a tour - I feel it at the end of a tour - all that I've gathered, and especially now that I am improvising so much.

Neil Peart

#97. Perils of solitude #1: People talk to you. I'd rather listen.

Neil Peart

#98. I am a big fan of Dos Passos' stylistic ability, his poetic approach to prose, but the ideas presented in the songs are quite different from those which he exemplified.

Neil Peart

#99. Once I had defined myself as a compositional drummer, I thought, "Well, I want to be an improvisational drummer."

Neil Peart

#100. A quality of justice A quantity of light A particle of mercy Makes the color of right

Neil Peart