Poetry has the virtue of being able to say twice as much as prose in half the time, and the drawback, if you do not give it your full attention, of seeming to say half as much in twice the time.

If you give yourself to your task at once, you won't have to do it twice.

Ours is the most time-pressed generation in history by virtue of the number of things competing for our attention.

The dog may be wonderful prose, but only the cat is poetry

Poetry has done enough when it charms, but prose must also convince

When you have good friends you've been around, every time they talk, you don't give them your full attention. You don't look them in the eye and stop. Half the time, you're listening, half the time, you are ignoring them.