I can explain it to you, but I can't comprehend it for you.

I don't understand it, and I don't like what I don't understand.

That was for me: I can’t understand anything in general unless I’m carrying along in my mind a specific example and watching it go.

It is not that you cannot understand it, it is that you cannot compute it.

If you can't understand it without an explanation, you can't understand it with an explanation.

If you can't explain it simply, you don't understand it well enough.

What I cannot create, I do not understand.

If I don't understand it, it must be art.

If you cannot understand something, then you have understood it incorrectly.

The fact that I myself, at the moment of painting, do not understand my own pictures, does not mean that these pictures have no meaning; on the contrary, their meaning is so profound, complex, coherent, and involuntary that it escapes the most simple analysis of logical intuition. To describe my pictures in everyday language, to explain them, it is necessary to submit them to special analyses and preferably with the most ambitiously objective scientific rigour possible. Then all explanation arises a posteriori; once the picture already exists as phenomenon.

Something we cannot see protects us from something we do not understand. The thing we cannot see is culture, in its intrapsychic or internal manifestation. The thing we do not understand is the chaos that gave rise to culture. If the structure of culture is disrupted, unwittingly, chaos returns. We will do anything — anything — to defend ourselves against that return.

You won't understand anything about imagination until you realise that it's not about making things up, it's about perception.

Do you not think that there are things which you cannot understand, and yet which are; that some people see things that others cannot?

To think it, wish it, even want it — but do it! No, that I cannot understand.