The MFA program did one great thing for me: It taught me how to be a better reader and critic. Nothing I wrote during my time at Columbia remains - but learning how to really deconstruct a work of fiction - that, of course, is a permanent part of me now.

Dinaw Mengestu

My eldest sister Beth is a doctor who studied at Harvard and Columbia and played basketball for Harvard. She set the athletic and academic standard for the rest of us to follow.

Abby Wambach

Who Us Tan

Not a day goes by that I don't look at myself in the mirror and ask God, 'Why me? Why did you choose me, Ainsley Earhardt from Columbia, South Carolina, to be one of a handful of female national news anchors?'

Ainsley Earhardt

God Car You

I used to teach at the Columbia journalism school, and I would tell my students that every book has to have a sentence that motivates it.

Alissa Quart

Would Very Used

I cannot wait until the day I can go back to school... I've already picked my program: anthropology at Columbia. I will not get in, but a girl can dream.

Allison Williams

Will Wait Until

I did actually have a deal with Columbia, but it became increasingly clear to me after signing with them that they didn't know what to do with me and I didn't know what to do for them, so we agreed to go our separate ways.

Amanda Marshall

Wit Ways Way

My first encounter with Wu-Tang Clan came when I ordered six CDs from those throwback catalog orders, from Columbia House or something, and '36 Chambers' was one of them. It was on from then.

Amanda Seales

Wit Use Us

Today's kids have a mind of their own, and they know how to exercise it. Even if I wanted to tell Sara or my son Ibrahim how to lead their lives - which I don't - they would not listen to me. Luckily, Sara chose to complete her studies before pursuing acting. She attended Columbia University and then devoted her attention to Bollywood.

Amrita Singh

Would Wood Woo

The genre of narrative business books that I love so much - the ones that have a you-are-there quality - was invented, or so it is said, in 1982 by David McClintick, who wrote 'Indecent Exposure,' a rollicking good read about a Hollywood scandal and the ultimate boardroom power struggle at Columbia Pictures.

Andrew Ross Sorkin

Power Love Good

My father was among the first of his generation to look into writers who've become part of the American lit. canon. When he wrote his master's thesis on William Faulkner in the Forties, he couldn't find anybody on the faculty at Columbia University to oversee it because they didn't read Faulkner.

Antonya Nelson

Art Wrote Writers

Columbia University, where I went to study in 1993, insisted its undergraduates learn a foreign language, so I discovered French.

Aravind Adiga

Age Where University

Columbia was a wonderful label for me. Wonderful. The records I made there garnered me an audience. I won a number of polls during the years that I was at Columbia. The Downbeat Jazz Poll. Leonard Feather, who was a huge critic back in the day, different polls that he had. The Playboy poll, a number of polls. So the music was great.

Aretha Franklin

Music Great Years

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.

Art Garfunkel

Work Architecture Would

There are a couple things that I could be doing, maybe owning a coffee shop or work in construction, building houses back in Nashville or British Columbia. I've also thought about being a property owner which would give me income and allow me to fix and maintain those properties to keep me busy.

Barry Trotz

Work Would Which

I was packing to go to Columbia University, and they told me that weekend that I got the 'Pitch Perfect.'

Ben Platt

Weekend Week University

At 13, I was a big, totally uncoordinated, hopeless football player. I responded to somebody else's rules, and I stayed just good enough to get a scholarship to Columbia, which was looking for scholar-athletes.

Brian Dennehy

Hope Good Which

Before I joined The Beach Boys, I was working at Columbia Records as a producer, and saw The Byrds come in and do their first overdub before Terry even met them.

Bruce Johnston

Work Working Them

I was the only person I'd ever met who had a record contract. None of the E Street Band, as far as I know, had been on an airplane until Columbia sent us to Los Angeles.

Bruce Springsteen

Who Us Until

I've always said it: I don't want to be the only Columbian playing on the PGA Tour, so, guys, just play some good golf and come join me here.

Camilo Villegas

Good Yin Ways

In the mainstream, I'm suspect because I'm black. I have dreadlocks, I have a goatee. I mean, I'm just suspect. In my classroom and at Columbia, I'm not as suspect because it's clear I know what I'm doing, but I am still suspect.

Carl Hart

Use Us Till

I'm the only tenured black faculty in the sciences at Columbia, in the middle of Harlem.

Carl Hart

Science Tenure Ten

Soon after my degree, in 1958 I went to the United States to enlarge my experience and to familiarize myself with particle accelerators. I spent about one and a half years at Columbia University.

Carlo Rubbia

The U.S. is blessed with tremendously creative and imaginative law students at places like Chicago, Harvard, Columbia and Yale.

Cass Sunstein

Usually, to promote a new work, I'll aspire to be published in the 'Columbia Law Review' or the 'Stanford Law Review' and to have at least five really enticing footnotes.

Cass Sunstein

The Snake and Columbia river system is vital to the Pacific Northwest.

Cathy McMorris Rodgers

I had been on the road for a long time and was not really getting anywhere. Bob Johnston, a friend of mine, had taken over Columbia in Nashville. He asked me if I wanted to come down. I did - thank God I did.

Charlie Daniels

I divide my time between Columbia, Maryland, and Lagos, Nigeria.

Chimamanda Ngozi Adichie

I didn't realize - you think you are doing a movie but then you realize it's a Columbia Pictures movie so it's probably going to have some publicity. Then you see a billboard and it's like, 'God! I'm on a billboard!' It doesn't hit all at once, it kind of unravels itself and it's still unraveling.

Chris Evans

We have never lost a crew member on the space station, but of course, the Columbia accident. I was - I'd already been an astronaut for a decade when the crew of Columbia was killed. And I went through test pilot school. Rick Husband and I were out at Edwards at test pilot school together. He was the commander of Columbia.

Chris Hadfield

In the summer of 1982, like most summers, I spent most every day at the Columbia Country Club in Chevy Chase, Maryland, swimming and practicing diving.

Christine Blasey Ford

But first I want to get my master's degree at Columbia's School of International Public Affairs.

Christy Romano

I wouldn't get nearly as many books written if I lived in New York. The Columbia Gorge is fantastic. When the sun shines, I just want to be outdoors.

Chuck Palahniuk

Columbia Law School men were being drafted, and suddenly women who had done well in college were considered acceptable candidates for the vacant seats.

Constance Baker Motley

I have a solo deal with Columbia Records. So it's about, do I want to release an album, when can we do it, what kind of album should it be, how should it be released and marketed and what's the right timing? Do I have time to do it? It's all about questions.

Cory Monteith

In one line of his poem he said good fences make good neighbors. I'd like to think that Alaska and British Columbia working together can prove that we can be pretty darned good neighbors without fences.

Dan Miller

I was creating commitment devices of my own long before I knew what they were. So when I was a starving post-doc at Columbia University, I was deep in a publish-or-perish phase of my career. I had to write five pages a day towards papers, or I would have to give up five dollars.

Daniel Goldstein

I've enjoyed collecting. I've enjoyed art ever since - I'll tell you when - I went to Columbia. I went to the Met, and I saw Poussin's 'Rape of the Sabine Women', and it's this incredible, epic, great, great painting.

Daniel S. Loeb

Perhaps I was always intensely curious, but my Columbia education gave me a framework and a perspective to investigate new things - things that could be put into a historical and philosophical lineage.

Daniel S. Loeb

I have a red-tail Columbian boa constrictor named 'Jade.'

Danny Green

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.

Dave Brubeck

Children are amazing, and while I go to places like Princeton and Harvard and Yale, and of course I teach at Columbia, NYU, and that's nice and I love students, but the most fun of all are the real little ones, the young ones.

David Dinkins

I have traveled the entire state and spent a lot of time out of doors. So I have known the landscape of the Columbia Basin for quite a while, and I have had this strong feeling about it for many years.

David Guterson

The cold grasp of corruption shackles the District of Columbia.

David Hogg

Harlem was an exciting place in the '50s. There were nightclubs that, as a student of Columbia, you dashed off to. The community seemed very viable still.

David Levering Lewis

I studied English at the College of Wooster in Ohio, and I did an M.F.A. in Poetry at Columbia.

David Means

I've given some money to the scholarships in the District of Columbia, to the best students in D.C... many of the students have written me letters telling me they could not have afforded to go to college without the scholarship and money I've given them.

David Rubenstein

I starred in a Broadway play that was Sidney Poitier's first directing job and the cast was Lou Gossett, Cicely Tyson, Diana Ladd and I played a Jewish kid who offered himself as a slave to two Columbia University students as reparations.

David Steinberg

There are a few Chinese smuggled in over the borders of British Columbia on the north and Mexico on the south.

Denis Kearney

There was one thing more than any other that turned this New York, liberal, Jewish, Columbia University graduate student away from modern liberalism: its use of moral equivalence to avoid confronting evil during the Cold War.

Dennis Prager

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

Dick Cheney

The MFA program did one great thing for me: It taught me how to be a better reader and critic. Nothing I wrote during my time at Columbia remains - but learning how to really deconstruct a work of fiction - that, of course, is a permanent part of me now.

Dinaw Mengestu