Creativity Quote by Willem de Kooning

Poverty, de Kooning suggests, is not just a lack of money but a hostile takeover of attention. The line lands because it flips a familiar moral story: the poor aren’t “undisciplined” or “unambitious”; they’re busy. Time, the resource self-help culture treats as equally distributed, becomes the hidden privilege. If you have money, you can buy back hours: a reliable car, childcare, a doctor who doesn’t require a day off work, a bank account that won’t punish you for being short. If you don’t, your life is admin - waiting rooms, paperwork, side hustles, long commutes, phone calls on hold, emergencies that become bureaucracies.

Coming from an artist, the remark has an extra bite. Modern art mythology romanticizes struggle: the starving genius in a cold loft, suffering nobly into greatness. De Kooning, who did arrive in the U.S. as an immigrant and worked punishing day jobs before recognition, punctures that romance. Scarcity doesn’t purify; it interrupts. It fractures the sustained focus that painting (or any deep craft) demands. The subtext is almost logistical: you can’t make work if survival keeps resetting the day to zero.

The sentence is also a quiet critique of how societies talk about poverty as a personal failing rather than a schedule imposed by institutions. “Takes up all your time” sounds mundane, even a little wry, which is precisely why it stings: it names poverty as theft so ordinary we stop calling it violence.