“I think as a filmmaker and as a director, you shortchange yourself if ...” — Joe Carnahan Quote

“I think as a filmmaker and as a director, you shortchange yourself if you inhibit the ability of your actor to bring their own personal experiences to the characters.”

“I love the ambiguous kind of endings. I think, oftentimes, that's what life really is - there's no concrete path for you to take. It's always kind of a jumble of variables. Behind this door could be a beautiful woman, and behind the same door could be a tiger, you know? You don't know.”

“On 'State of Affairs,' we're going after some names that you wouldn't think would traditionally do TV. A show that shoots in Los Angeles is such a rare bird in hand that I think we're gonna have the pick of the litter.”

“If 'The Blacklist' taught me anything, it was kind of open-ended intrigue and leaving questions unanswered. Creating this kind of mystery by virtue of depriving the audience of these easy answers was what I was kind of into.”

“I'm pretty rigorous about the drafts I turn in. I don't turn in something that's so ungodly they go, 'What the hell is this?'”

“I might not write fiction in the literary sense. But I write very well. My characters are good. My dialogue is good. And my stories are really involving.”

“There aren't enough good roles for strong women. I wish we had more female writers. Most of the female characters you see in films today are the 'poor heartbroken girl.'”

“You can't have virtue without sin. What I'm after is having my characters' virtues defined by how they operate in a very sinful environment. That's how you test people.”

“I find that the only way to make my characters really interesting to children is to exaggerate all their good or bad qualities, and so if a person is nasty or bad or cruel, you make them very nasty, very bad, very cruel. If they are ugly, you make them extremely ugly. That, I think, is fun and makes an impact.”

“I'm a little hesitant to make my characters sentimental or to risk having the work labeled sentimental. It's something that I resist as a reader, and I don't resist it in life. I'm not an unmoved person by any stretch, but I think I don't want, I guess, to indulge those kinds of things sometimes in fiction. I can't tell you why exactly.”