Are you, perhaps, thinking of Nabokov’s version of ‘stranger danger,’ which he describes in “The Art of Literature and Commonsense”:

 

“And the more brilliant, the more unusual the man, the nearer he is to the stake.  Stranger always rhymes with danger.  The meek prophet, the enchanter in his cave, the indignant artist, the nonconforming little schoolboy, all share in the same sacred danger.  And this being so, let us bless them, let us bless the freak; for in the natural evolution of things, the ape would perhaps never have become man had not a freak appeared in the family . . . “ (from Lectures on Literature, p. 372)