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" 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

Good

Growing Up

Sports

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

" I expect if you're a professional public speaker, you probably wouldn't want to go onstage and sing and play drums. "

" Pure libertarianism believes that people will be generous and help each other. Well, they won't. I wish it were so, and I live that way. I help panhandlers, but other people are, 'Oh look at that - why doesn't he get a job?' While I believe in all that freedom, I also believe that no one should suffer needlessly. "

" 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. "

" 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

Mind

" Our songs were not written to be listened to in headphones or on the radio. They were written to be played. All of the little infinite detail that went into the arrangements and giving ourselves lots of breathing room in terms of playing what we wanted to play and using up any ideas that we had - all of those were conceived to be performed. "

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

" 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

Gold

History

" 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

Rich

House

" Ever since I was a kid, I always wanted to play music that I liked, and even when I was in cover bands when I was a teenager we only played cover tunes that we liked. That was the simple morality that I grew up with. "

" 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. "

" We don't want to be Mick Jagger and the Rolling Stones. That type of thing wasn't what we were after. It was most important for each of us to be equal in input and output - each of us has to pull the same amount, musically, in composition and in every sense of being in the band. "

" 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. "

" If you choose not to decide, you still have made a choice. "

" 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. "

" The reality is that my style of drumming is largely an athletic undertaking, and it does not pain me to realize that, like all athletes, there comes a time to... take yourself out of the game. "

Neil Peart

Yourself

Time

" I believe in taxation and health care that is outside the usual libertarian mandate, because I don't want people to have to suffer. It's as simple as that. "

" I don't like lyrics that are just thrown together, that were obviously written as you went along, or the song was already written and the guy made up the lyrics in five minutes. "

Neil Peart

You

Together

" It's not the music you hear in your head that other people are going to hear. You have to be able to make it true enough to the image in your head, and that's where technique and technology come in, for sure, and knowledge. It's not true and will never be true that someone who knows nothing can sit in a basement and make great music. "

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

" 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. "

" 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. "

" 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. "

" 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. "

" If I go play golf with the guys, it's intended to be a joke. "

Neil Peart

Play

Joke

" To me, drum soloing is like doing a marathon and solving equations at the same time. "

" Once, I went speeding past an old couple and smiled as I imagined their conversation: him grumbling about me and her telling him not to be such an old grouch. Then, suddenly I was in tears, thinking, 'I'll never get to be a grumpy old grandpa!' "

Neil Peart

Thinking

Tears

" 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. "

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

" It's interesting. I've known quite a few good athletes that can't begin to play a beat on the drum set. Most team sport is about the smooth fluidity of hand-eye coordination and physical grace, where drumming is much more about splitting all those things up. "