236 Quotes by Neil Peart

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.

Big ring around moon, three or four days from full. Rain coming? Big wave every 10 seconds, sometimes like distant explosion, booming sub-bass.

Thoreau, “At death, our friends and relatives either draw nearer to us, and are found out, or depart farther from us, and are forgotten.

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.”

Once I had defined myself as a compositional drummer, I thought, “Well, I want to be an improvisational drummer.”

As the train rolled through the countryside, so lush and green, and into the sprawling suburbs of south London, I stared around at all the strangeness: the narrow little “terraced” houses all in rows of brick and chimneypots, the tiny back gardens with clotheslines and garden sheds, the little cars all on the wrong side of the road – it was all so delightfully foreign, and exotic. My first lesson that the rest of the world really was more different than I knew or imagined.

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

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.

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.