Wish I'd said that - July 16, 2018
"The main impulse of a true genius is not to look into himself, with endless digging into his conscience and subconscious - as Pasternak said, ‘conscience is like the headlights of a car; their light directed outward illuminates the way, directed inward leads to catastrophe’ - but to look out of himself. And to give. And if the main impulse of your existence is the desire to give, you cannot really be a nasty character. That’s what, probably, Pushkin had in mind when he exclaimed in his Mozart and Salieri: 'Genius and villainy are incompatible.'"
Chronicles magazine 1/88 [again I had regrettably not yet in 1988 acquired the habit of recording the author as well as publication when I recorded points I considered noteworthy]