Quotes About Cliches

Sean and I are fighting so many cliches, it's funny. But ultimately we just want to play people the songs we wrote while we were in our pajamas, in love.

Instinct is still important, but now I can easily identify problems like cliches and mixed metaphors, and I have a broader palette to work off of.

It's hard not to use cliches when talking about parenthood.

fast-thinkers ... think in cliches, in the "received ideas" that Flaubert talks about--banal, conventional, common ideas that are received generally. By the time they reach you, these ideas have already been received by everybody else, so reception is never a problem.

I think my mistakes were kind of common - leaning on cliches and adjectives in the place of clear, vivid writing. But at least I knew how to spell, which seems to be a rarity these days.

Lord Snow says that every man may be permitted his own clichés. But this is not enough. He must invent his own clichés and then persist in them until, if other people use them, their source is instantly recognizable. Thus plagiarism shall be turned into homage.

All generalizations are bad.

You mean,' went on Wimsey, 'that they think in clichés.' 'Eh?' 'Formulae. "There's nothing like a mother's instinct" "Dogs and children always know." "Kind hearts are more than coronets. "Suffering refines the character"—that sort of guff, despite all evidence to the contrary.

Very full of cant phrases

Come out with all the old inane cliches and curl a sardonic lip at them.

Clichés can be quite fun. That's how they got to be clichés.

It is not literally true that a picture is worth a thousand words. Most people will not see what is in a picture, or will see it through the most readily available visual cliches. It takes training and an analytical vocabulary to talk about what is in a picture, and to know what to look for. A picture is worth a thousand words only for those who already have internalized an adequate vocabulary.

And sometimes all that happened was that the misleading old euphemisms were replaced by the misleading new clichés.

News reports stand up as people, and people wither into editorials. Clichés walk around on two legs while men are having theirs shot off.

Sometimes you can hear them talk, other times you can't. All the same old cliches, is that a woman or a man?

When academics claim a topic is obsolete, they mean merely they are tired of flogging it with their cliches.

Take our politicians: they're a bunch of yo-yos. The presidency is now a cross between a popularity contest and a high school debate, with an encyclopedia of cliches.

In every election in American history both parties have their cliches. The party that has the cliches that ring true wins.

All good writers are sensitive to clichés and endeavor to avoid them

Clichés are what good writing is all about. Because our lives are basically clichés.

administration involvement with the moral clichés of internationalism (derived from liberal and radical ideas of the nineteen thirties) is probably as great a source of current confusion as anything else

Funny, I'd forgotten that what comes to you when you take a psychedelic is not always a revelation of something new and startling; you're more liable to find yourself reminded of simple things you know and forgot you knew — seeing them freshly — old, basic truths that long ago became cliches, so you stopped paying attention to them.

What is all wisdom save a collection of platitudes?

The cliches are that it's the most generic Starsky and Hutch plot you can find.