[In 1990, regarding his early years at the Actor's Studio in New York] The actor wanted the audience to recognize an unsavory character as
truthfully as he could, so that any audience seeing it would be
repelled by that individual and vow never to be like him. If one person
left a performance saying, "I will never be as bad as that character
was", the actor felt fulfilled. If the person left the theater better
than he entered it, we felt we were accomplishing something. The
reverse was true, too. If one in the audience saw and believed the
goodness in the human condition and sought to emulate this behavior,
we, the actors, felt a warm sense of accomplishment. Sometimes, people
would come backstage in these amateur school productions and state in
an oblique way that they were better people for seeing the production.
This was better than any award an actor could get, and still is!