Top 15 Neil Peart Quotes

Magic exists, but it often requires some planning.

You can't get together with three people and say, 'we want a career spanning 20 years and a really loyal following — here's the plan.' We just did what we thought was right, made music we liked, and hoped other people would too. So far, that's been the secret formula.

I tend to write for a general reader — my ideal audience is someone curious and intelligent who doesn't know anything about my preoccupations — in the same way that songwriting is for an imaginary listener.

I'm a compositional drummer — and then in the same breath I thought, 'wait a minute, I want to be an improvisational drummer.' So I push myself out of my comfort zone.

The first time reggae music really got into my soul — I'll never forget, it was the Bob Marley song 'Natural Mystic,' just sitting in a car hearing it — and I suddenly got it. I got what reggae was all about.

I was in a village in Togo in West Africa, travelling by bicycle, and I heard this rhythm echoing across the valley — just two drummers with hand drums — and it engraved itself on my mind and became a huge influence on me rhythmically.

Most of my rhythmic growth is evolutionary — what I've worked on grows into something else, and into something else.

You can get comfortable working with the same producer — some people do their whole career — but we always wanted new brains to pick: new criticisms, new enthusiasms, new opinions.

The literal meaning of enthusiasm is 'infected with the god' — and if you can share that fire of yours to light someone else's, that's a great thing.

Music is certainly about sharing your enthusiasm. We love our music, and we hope other people will like it too — there's nothing more calculated than that about it.

When people come up and say, 'you influenced me to play drums,' I say, 'apologize to your parents for me.'

Drumming-wise, my determination was more important than my talent early on. I had to work so hard to learn so many things — but I was relentless in terms of determination.

I wanted to read every book ever written.

It all comes down to a kind of restlessness. When people talk about boredom, I can honestly say I've never been bored for a second in my life — but I've always found another way not to be.

You can't help but be stung. I don't think anyone I'd want to know would be above that.