Quotes of All Topics . Occasions . Authors
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.
Everyone loves a slice of period-drama-pie, but I think the success of 'Upstairs Downstairs' is really down to the wonderful format that Jean Marsh and Eileen Atkins created.
It's so great to be able to write from home. My bread is rising downstairs, and I'm upstairs writing. I have a writing room that my grandchildren consider one of their playrooms.
We all live in a house on fire, no fire department to call; no way out, just the upstairs window to look out of while the fire burns the house down with us trapped, locked in it.
'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.
I don't believe in remaking television series. I should never have agreed to reviving 'Upstairs Downstairs' because my heart wasn't in it, but part of me did think about my pension.
'Upstairs Downstairs' somehow bestrode the different genres that had come before it to create a new drama entity. I suppose that's one of the reasons why it became so instantly popular.
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.
Look at my life. I almost died. I almost died several times. My shoulders were down, man. But I kicked out. I kicked out again. Someone upstairs obviously likes me. So maybe I should, too.
As I stood there absorbing Hammett's novel, the slot machines at the back of the shop were clanking and whirring, and in the billiard room upstairs the perpetual poker game was being played.
If nobody needs me - and usually, these days, they don't - I'll fall asleep until around midnight. Then I go upstairs and work until 4 A.M., and that's when I go back to bed for good. It suits me.
I come from a very working-class background, so my family would have been downstairs in the past, as opposed to upstairs. People are often quite surprised to hear that, that I'm not actually posh.
I always performed when I was a child. My parents got very annoyed, because my brother and I had our little bedrooms upstairs, and I would plaster the house with posters with arrows pointing upstairs.
After being on the field for so long and feeling like you have some control over the outcome or what's happening out there, now I'm upstairs, and I have no control over anything. I'm working through that.
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.'
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.
As far as memories go, I was around for the very first WrestleMania. I was a young kid upstairs at my uncle's restaurant in a change room or staff room watching it, I think, illegally, on a black and white television.
There were times when gangs would approach me, but my father was way stronger than them. They would come make threats and stuff, and I was like, 'You don't know the opposition I've got upstairs. I'm not scared of you.'
I thought the only way you can get into things is... through the basement... exactly where my studio was ... I could creep upstairs and snatch at things, and bring them down with me... where I could munch away at them.
A landlord is showing a couple around an apartment. The husband looks up and says, 'Wait a minute. This apartment doesn't have a ceiling.' The landlord answers, 'That's OK. The people upstairs don't walk around that much.'
When we were growing up, I got kicked out of Timbaland's house every day. He was the DJ for my brother's rap group in junior high school. So I was 7, and while Tim's DJ'ing and my brother's rapping, I'd be upstairs dancing.
In my first home that I actually purchased, I built this nice little basement apartment, I moved into it, and I rented out the whole house upstairs. That allowed me to live there for free - because that's all I could afford.
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.
Discounting the ineffably repetitive homophobic barbs that I receive most days, Twitter trolls' most common gripe against me appears to be that I am 'posh.' Contrary to their unshakeable view, I was not born into the upstairs world.
For every veteran who goes through a divorce, a wife goes through one, too. For every veteran alone in the basement, there is a wife upstairs, bewildered, isolated and in despair from the dark clouds of war that hangs over family life.
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.
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 really do love 'Panama.' But I'd also have to admit that right now, if I were driven to write another novel like that, I wouldn't even try to find a publisher for it. It simply wouldn't be published. I'd be writing it to put in my closet upstairs.
Allowing alternative narrative modes in popular entertainment may seem obvious, yet when you turn a pilot into the people upstairs and the main character isn't after what she wants by the top of page two, you get treated as if you've failed at writing.
Every year's going to be a what-if. That's the game of basketball. What if a guy turns his ankle? What if a guy gets in a car wreck coming to the arena? There are so many different aspects that could happen that nobody knows. Only the man upstairs knows.
I remember, when I was a kid, watching my mother jam herself into her girdle - a piece of equipment so rigid it could stand up on its own - and I remember her coming home from fancy parties and racing upstairs to extricate herself from its cruel iron grip.
The walls of our upstairs hallway testify that we once had photogenic children. There are rows of framed pictures that show them playing baseball, basketball, holding a toad, and smiling in the sunlight at their eager parents. Everything is orderly and bright.
I feel like I'm being watched. Always. Like, I want to tan topless somewhere, and I know I probably could never do that. Even if I'm upstairs in my bedroom, and the curtains are pulled, I feel like a paparazzo's outside on a boat somewhere, or somebody's peeping.
We have to help others. I hope that some of the young players today understand that. It's not about them. The Man Upstairs gave them that ability to play, and play consistently, but he also wants them to open their hearts and understand that people need their help.
I tell young people that people aren't just going to flock to you as your mentors. You have to seek them out. It could be your next-door neighbor; it could be somebody upstairs from you, somebody down the block from you. An aunt or an uncle. Some relative. A parent.
I didn't go Hollywood on the outside with flashy cars, upstairs maids and mink-covered bathroom fixtures. I went Hollywood on the inside, and that's worst of all. I tried to avoid being natural. I lowered my voice. I copied the mannerisms of other stars. I struck poses.
I stagger out of bed, take the dogs outside, and then I'll get a Diet Coke and a couple of dog biscuits and go upstairs. By the time I've consumed my Diet Coke and had a quick run through the morning email and Twitter feed, I will probably be compos mentis enough to work.
It's like, 'Oh, great, drag queens can excel!' - but then the ceiling is so low. You're only allowed on the first floor; you're not allowed to go play with the big boys upstairs. Even RuPaul, who's a massive success, has been limited to where her music career can take her.
My brother had been given a chemistry set for his bar mitzvah, but he wasn't interested in it. It was upstairs in the attic, and I would sneak up there and use it at great peril because I was afraid if he found out, he would get very angry at me, but he didn't seem to care.
The writing was so clearly written on the wall about me, but I didn't see it. I had no role models. I didn't know there was even a possibility of being gay. I battled with it, but this was the way God made me. If you have a problem with it, take it up with the man upstairs.
'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.
My mom's whole side of the family, they're all Packers fans. My mom's a Bears fan. My stepdad is a Vikings guy. So that gets ugly. My mom sits upstairs watching the Bears game; he sits in the basement. They can't watch it together. Football's a violent anger in our family dynamic.
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.
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.
But Donald heard on Radio Disney that they were giving a Nintendo 64 away to the ninetieth caller every day for a week. He listened all week and kept calling in until he gauged the perfect time, and one day he ran upstairs and said, 'I won it!' He's always been able to will what he wants.
The secret to a happy marriage is if you can be at peace with someone within four walls, if you are content because the one you love is near to you, either upstairs or downstairs, or in the same room, and you feel that warmth that you don't find very often, then that is what love is all about.
Declining to go to church with my parents in the morning, I would ostentatiously set out for the Monist Society in the afternoon, down an obscure street which it seemed a little improper to be walking on, as everything was closed for Sunday, upstairs through a sort of side entrance over a saloon.
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.
My first experiences of Colorado travel have been rather severe. At Greeley, I got a small upstairs room at first, but gave it up to a married couple with a child, and then had one downstairs no bigger than a cabin, with only a canvas partition. It was very hot, and every place was thick with black flies.
I really liked to perform. My mother always tells this story: I was five. They had a party, and they'd put me to bed. I heard everyone on the rooftop, and I went upstairs. No one paid any attention to me, so I took a hose and sprayed everyone. Very elegant, right? 'It's me! Look at me!' I loved the attention.