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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

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Neil Peart
Age: 67 †
Born: 1952
Born: September 12
Died: 2020
Died: January 7
Composer
Drummer
Jazz Musician
Lyricist
Musician
Record Producer
Songwriter
Writer
City of Hamilton
Neil Ellwood Peart
Art
Human
Rarified
Humans
Accomplish
Life
Jokes
Highest
Expression
Funny
Difficult

More quotes by Neil Peart

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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.
Neil Peart
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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
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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
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But glittering prizes and endless compromises, Shatter the illusion of integrity...
Neil Peart
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Playing a three-hour Rush show is like running a marathon while solving equations.
Neil Peart
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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
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...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
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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.
Neil Peart
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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
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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
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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
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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
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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!
Neil Peart
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If you want something done right, just forget it.
Neil Peart
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One likes to believe in the freedom of music...
Neil Peart
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Stamina is the force that drives the drumming it's not really a sprint.
Neil Peart
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Geddy once joked, 'You're the only guy I know who rehearses to rehearse!
Neil Peart
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From the point of ignition. To the final drive. The point of the journey is not to arrive.
Neil Peart
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Don't try to change Doofus, let Doofus change you.
Neil Peart
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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