I've done loads of things people have never seen - dramas on BBC4 and plays upstairs at the Royal Court and the Bush - and because I didn't go to drama school, they gave me an education.

It's extraordinary what children put up with. I happened to see two of my uncles put my father up against the wall of my grandmother's house and knock his teeth out, because he'd been unpleasant to my mother. The next day I went upstairs and found my father making a rather half-hearted attempt to gas himself.

Sometimes we're at hotels, and I'll answer the phone. They'll say, 'Mr. Ripa, your breakfast is coming upstairs.' And I'm like, Is my father-in-law here? But, obviously, I'm proud either way - Ripa or Consuelos.

I was asleep, in the upstairs bedroom, in the rear of the house. There was this tremendous crash, there was a terrible wind force hitting my body, and then I blanked out.

I write in the afternoon, from about 12 until 6 or 7. I use an upstairs room as my office. Once I get going I keep at it, and it usually takes about six months from the first blank screen until 'The End.'

The house burned an hour before midnight on the last day of April. The wild, distant ringing of the fire bells woke George Hazard. He stumbled through the dark hallway, then upstairs to the mansion tower, and stepped outside into the narrow balcony.

My idea of working out is going upstairs in my apartment.

On the morning of Thanksgiving, I would wake up to the home smelling of all good things, wafting upstairs to my room. I would set the table with the fancy silverware and china and hope that my parents and grandmother wouldn't have the annual Thanksgiving fight about Richard Nixon.

'The Exorcist' is absolutely my favorite horror film, and I watched it when I was, like, seven years old with my mother for the first time. I don't know why my mom let me watch that. I couldn't go to the bathroom by myself. I couldn't go upstairs by myself. I couldn't sleep.

When we run out of them upstairs, I've been known to appropriate some from our greenroom, pocketing a few with one hand as I smile and greet our guests with the other. One time, Dave Zinczenko of 'Eat this, Not That!' fame, busted me in the act. The cookies apparently fall in the 'not that' category. I made a note of it.

I get up around 8 o'clock, which gives me enough time to walk dogs and feed chickens and horses. Then I get to work in my home office upstairs, and basically, I don't stop until I've written 2,000 words and/or the Stephen Colbert show is over.

My mom would give me a piece to play, but I wouldn't do any theory because when it came time to do it I would sneak back upstairs and watch TV. So, I had these kind of nonchalant lessons for years, then it just started soaking in.

I spend a lot of time working as a painter and in my studio I go from upstairs where I paint to downstairs where I play and record, so I get this thing crossing over.

We grew up in Islington, north London, in a Georgian terraced house that nowadays would be split into flats. Our grandparents lived upstairs, there was another tenant living up there and downstairs was the office where people in the area paid their rent.

I've always had great faith in the Man Upstairs.

Maybe since I was 35 years old it was time to go upstairs.

'Upstairs Downstairs' and 'Downton Abbey' appeal to people because they're about our history, they look so beautiful, are written by amazing writers and have high production values.

At home in Ghaziabad, everyone is a pure vegetarian. In fact, when I want to cook non-veg there, my mum shoos me out on the terrace where I have my cooking utensils. I'm told categorically that whatever non-veg or egg, etc., that I have to cook, I should do upstairs and not enter her kitchen at all.

I started on 'Saturday Night Live' the same time Conan started on Late Night. We just had a relationship because I would be upstairs in the studio and whenever he couldn't get a guest - which was often back then since he was just starting out - he would just call me down to be a guest.

There are people out there dying every day, so when you wake up, you just have to thank the Man Upstairs for another day on this planet. There's not much else we can ask for.