When I travel abroad because I'm Columbian I'm always one that they check twice and security and I'm the one that they open my bag and the one they pull to the side to check the visa.

Marriage commissioners who choose not to marry homosexuals are being fired. A Knights of Columbus chapter in British Columbia is in court because it chooses not allow a lesbian group to use its facility for marriage ceremonies. The list goes on.

After the United States entered the war I joined the Naval Reserve and spent ninety days in a Columbia University dormitory learning to be a naval officer.

When I arrived at Columbia I gave up acting and became interested in all things French. French poetry French history French literature.

My father who was from a wealthy family and highly educated a lawyer Yale and Columbia walked out with the benefit of a healthy push from my mother a seventh grade graduate who took a typing course and got a secretarial job as fast as she could.

I got a poster from Columbia Records and there's Miles Davis Charlie Mingus Ellington Count Basie - everybody in that poster has died I'm the only one left. And great players like Paul Desmond and Gerry Mulligan it's hard to believe they're gone because we were all so close. But I believe in the future and the tradition will go on.

The one thing you've got to say about Columbia is that it has courses that are famous. It has alumni who come back and say it was the best thing they ever did.

The Columbia is lost but the dreams that inspired its crew remain with us.

That attitude does not exist so much today but in those days there was a very sharp distinction between basic physics and applied physics. Columbia did not deal with applied physics.

I was a student at Columbia College actually in the Architecture school. Paul would drive in from Queens showing me these new songs. I can't remember us working it out.