Sometimes, I think I could have been a major movie star with the vast mansion and staff. I look at my Volvo and think it could be a limousine. I think of the roles I turned down. But then I wouldn't have had any children.

When I was about 8, I used to go into one of the rooms in the mansion, and I would open a magazine like the 'Ladies Home Journal,' and I would see these characters on the pages and then become them, talking back and forth.

Life got very good - we went from living in a one-bedroom apartment to a five-bedroom mansion by the time I was in high school. I had everything I wanted growing up, though all I wanted was music stuff - drums, a PC, turntables.

Besides buying a mansion or something, everything I wanted I always got. I'm just ready to invest it and save it. Otherwise, life can hit you, but you can't go back to working at Home Depot. That's why I always just be stacking.

My body back at the Playboy mansion was the most important thing in life back then because we were in the spotlight every minute. We had to look good. The girls who gained the weight, those were the girls who didn't get the work.

Lance Armstrong has a 17th-century, 15-foot Spanish fresco of the crucifixion hanging on the wall of his Austin mansion. This doesn't mean - and some of you Armstrong acolytes might want to sit down for this - that Lance is Jesus.

The more people told me that, you know, wow, you should be so blessed. Don't you feel blessed? And you have all this - mansion and all these beautiful things. And I said, you know - the more they told me that, the more depressed I got.

A few months ago, I had the pleasure of actually visiting the Playboy Mansion. I saw the peacocks, fed grapes to the monkeys, and even braved the fabled Grotto. After seeing the estate, I understood why anyone would be reluctant to leave.

'The Moonstone' was all I could have hoped for. A mysterious, cursed jewel, wrested from India, only to be stolen later from a great British mansion. Enigmatic, dangerous priests who follow it across the ocean in hopes of wresting it back.

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.

I got invited to the Playboy Mansion with the Lonely Island guys after their first season on 'SNL,' and I sat in the corner drinking coffee and talking to Akiva Schaffer about what aspect ratio he was going to shoot 'Hot Rod' in. Like, that's what we talk about.

When Holly Madison, Hef's former chief girlfriend, came out with a tell-all book about life in the Mansion, the most bizarre revelation was that, prior to the man's infamous orgies, all of the live-in girlfriends were required to put on matching pink flannel pajamas.

For generations, people have come to U.S. shores to seek opportunity. It's what my grandfather did a century ago, when he came to Seattle, and worked as a houseboy just one mile from the Washington State governor's mansion that I was privileged to inhabit for eight years.

Nightclubs are the equivalent of a Catholic Church in a poor country. You hear a lot of stuff about churches filled with gold while the people are starving. But what elitists don't get is that for poor people, the church is their own mansion. Nightclubs fill the same function.

Mormonism truly was a part of my every decision since the day I was born. It taught me to serve others and to feel comfort about the next life. Who doesn't want to live for eternity and have a 'mansion in heaven'? It sounded like a rad deal to me when I was in my teenage years.

Maybe it's my freak flag that, when I go to a haunted mansion, I would rather blend in with them and be part of the story rather than have someone jump out at me. To be part of the fantasy seems way more interesting to me, to embed myself in there and just drop in, in that way.

Al Gore, the former vice-president of the United States, lives in a mansion that uses more electricity than the average family's bungalow! David Suzuki rides on a bus that uses more fuel than a Smart car to get across Canada! Oh my God! And this is just the tip of the vanishing iceberg!

When I used to work my 9 to 5, I used to go to this abandoned house down the street. It was for sale, but nobody knew it. It was a mansion. Every day, or at least four days out the week, I would just stand on the porch of the house for like a year straight. That was around 2001 or 2002.

You didn't have to read 'Playboy,' visit the mansion, wear pajamas, or even be straight: The effects of its ideas about women on the American psyche were totalizing. Women were inferior to men because, for 'Playboy,' they were scenery - pretty, passive, usually white, often blonde, there.

When the idea of 'Chopped' surfaced, it was originally meant to be taped at some guy's mansion with him and his crazy Chihuahua. A stuffy fellow in a tuxedo was to host, and the losing chef's dish was then fed to the dog! I am not kidding, I saw it! I think it is genius! Twisted, but genius!

I was at this dinner for Rhodes Scholars. And we were in the Rhodes mansion, which is this fancy mansion on the Oxford campus. And I remember I looked up in the rotunda, and I saw that etched into the marble were the names of Rhodes Scholars who had left Oxford, and had fought and died in World War II.

What I don't like is the way people automatically think I am a kept woman, that he pays my expenses. This puts me in a rage. I've always paid my own way, even while living in his mansion. I've kept an apartment of my own. In fact, I not only buy my own clothes, but many of Hef's, too - he just hates to shop.

From 1961 to 1964, I was fortunate enough to work at a think tank in the Kenwood neighborhood of Chicago. As a writer and editor, I reported in a publication about the thinkers. Our offices were in a former mansion; I worked in what had been the ballroom. As I sat typing my copy, I imagined the dancers waltzing.

I think the most successful are the most paranoid. The first thing people do when they buy a mansion is they build the biggest wall you could possibly build around it. What happens is, now you become a target. If I go into the hood, I'm at a disadvantage. They could carry guns. I can't. They can hit me in the face. I can't.

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