Cliches Quotes

The average man never really thinks from end to end of his life. The mental activity of such people is only a mouthing of cliches. What they mistake for thought is simply a repetition of what they have heard. My guess is that well over 80 percent of the human race goes through life without having a single original thought. ~ H.L. Mencken

We are accustomed to repeating the cliché, and to believing, that 'our most precious resource is our children.' But we have plenty of children to go around, God knows, and as with Doritos, we can always make more. The true scarcity we face is practicing adults, of people who know how marginal, how fragile, how finite their lives and their stories and their ambitions really are but who find value in this knowledge, even a sense of strange comfort, because they know their condition is universal, is shared. ~ Michael Chabon

Fashion fosters cliches of beauty, but I want to tear them apart. ~ Miuccia Prada

One of the most common platitudes we heard was that "words failed." But words were not failing us at all. It was not true that there was no way to describe our experience. We had plenty of language to talk to each other about the horror of what was happening, and talk we did. If there was a communication problem it was that there were too many words; they were far too heavy and too specific to be inflicted upon others. If something was failing it was the functionality of routine, platitudinous language - the comforting clichés were now inapplicable and perfectly useless. We instinctively protected other people from the knowledge we possessed; we let them think that words failed, because we knew they didn't want to be familiar with the vocabulary we used daily. We were sure they didn't want to know what we did; we didn't want to know it either. ~ Aleksandar Hemon

You cannot step a foot into the literature about the 1960s without being told how 'creative', 'idealistic', and 'loving' it was, especially in comparison to the 1950s. I fact, the counterculture of the Sixties represented the triumph of what the art critic Harold Rosenberg famously called the 'herd of the independent minds'. Its so-called creativity consisted in continually recirculating a small number of radical cliches; its idealism was little more than irresponsible utopianism; and its crusading for 'love' was largely a blind for hedonistic self-indulgence. ~ Roger Kimball

The problem with cliches is not that they contain false ideas, but rather that they are superficial articulations of very good ones. The sun is often on fire at sunset and the moon discreet, but if we keep saying this every time we encounter a sun or a moon, we will end up believing that this is the last rather than the first word to be said on the subject. Cliches are detrimental insofar as they inspire us to believe that they adequately describe a situation while merely grazing its surface. ~ Alain De Botton

You need cliches. Cliches are what people respond to. ~ Matthew Vaughn

That's the shock: All cliches are true. The years really do speed by. Life really is as short as they tell you it is. And there really is a God - so do I buy that one? If all the other cliches are true ... Hell, don't pose me that one. ~ David Bowie

It doesn't matter how educated, moneyed, or smart you are: when your child's footprints end at the river's edge, when the one you love has gone into the woods with a bleak outlook and a loaded gun, when the chaplain is walking toward you with the bad news in her mouth, then only the cliches are true, and you will repeat them, unashamed. Your life, too, will swing suddenly and cruelly in a new direction with breathtaking speed, and if you are really wise - and it's surprising and wondrous, Brother, how many people have this wisdom in then - you will know enough to look around for love. It will be there, standing right on the hinge, holding out its arms to you, If you are wise, whoever you are, you will let go, fall against the love, and be held. ~ Kate Braestrup

One of the problems of this genre is that there are cliches everywhere, and you've got to be careful and watch out. Our rule with cliches is to either gently acknowledge them and make fun of them, or do something else. Milady is, in one sense, a villain because she does bad things. ~ Adrian Hodges

The personal appropriation of cliches is a condition for the spread of cultural tourism. ~ Serge Daney

Most of my cliches aren't original. ~ Chuck Knox

As each day passed the community became more and more indoctrinated into the world of psychobabble. It was used to keep patients in subservient positions. "Poor impulse control," "defiance," or "you want what you want when you want it" were all catch phrases. Pronouncing judgement, Brian said, "These recovery institutions are all alike. Former addicts own and operate them. They're founded on the cliches these individuals accuse us of, grandiosity, arrogance, and selfishness. They take away human dignity and wrap themselves in the AA free spiritual principals, while charging so much money you'd think you were staying at the Ritz in Paris. ~ Stephanie Schoenberger

in winter,
it's the snowflakes.

in spring,
it's the raindrops.

in summer,
it's the flower petals.

in autumn,
it's the leaves.

all these things
will eventually fall,

but not one of them
will fall as hard

as i do for you when i
wake up every morning.

-all the cliches were written with us in mind. ~ Amanda Lovelace

I'm not a guy who likes cliches. I don't think that stereotypes and cliches are the end of the line, when it comes to a performance. ~ Chris Bauer

To paraphrase president Kennedy's inaugural, the torch has been passed to a new generation of cartoonists and they are doing really interesting stuff, taking the old cliches and breathing new life into them and inventing new ones. This doesn't mean the previous generation of which I'm a charter member isn't doing good stuff but this new material is invigorating everyone. ~ Robert Mankoff

Ford considers that development journalism means getting behind the cliches of starving children and getting people to tell their own stories: "We are looking at big policies affecting developing countries and looking at how this relates on the ground to those who expect to be benefiting. ~ Anonymous

Too many new writers dress up old cliches. ~ Christopher Fowler

People regurgitate the same old cliches and it becomes like a photocopy of a photocopy of something that's vaguely interesting. ~ Steve Coogan

Cliches and adjectives permeated my prose. ~ Dick Schaap

Swallowed my pride and shit lions. ~ Brian Spellman

Desi, Desi, Desi what am I going to do with you? (Kyrian)
Don't you dare take that flippant tone with me! (Desiderius)
Why ever not? (Kyrian)
Because I am not some scared little Daimon to run cringing from you. I am your worst nightmare. (Desiderius)
Must you resort to cliches? C'mon, Desidisastrous, couldn't you think of anything more original than that B-movie dialogue staple? (Kyrian) ~ Sherrilyn Kenyon

To have luck and fail to act on it is tantamount to not having luck at all. In fact, it was worse. Barnes thought back to his self-help manuals. They all proclaimed with compelling force the necessity of recognizing opportunity then seizing it when it stuck. ~ Joseph G. Peterson

The war against the cliche has become the new cliche. ~ Marty Rubin

The night that our friend's wife died, my brokenhearted husband called his mother: "What do I say?"... There is nothing to say. Stop thinking there is something to say to make it go away. It won't go away. Abandon your answers. Avoid your cliches. Don't blame God and don't blame him. Learn to sit in the sadness. ~ Sarah Bessey

We long ago ceased expecting that a President speak his own words. We no longer expect him actually to know the answers to questions put to him. We have, in effect, come to elect newscasters-and by a similar process: not for their probity or for their intelligence, but for their "believability."

"Hope" is a very different exhortation than, for example, save, work, cooperate, sacrifice, think. It means: "Hope for the best, in a process over which you have no control." For, if one had control, if one could endorse a candidate with actual, rational programs, such a candidate demonstrably possessed of character and ability sufficient to offer reasonable chance of carrying these programs out, we might require patience or understanding, but why would we need hope?

We have seen the triumph of advertising's bluntest and most ancient tool, the unquantifiable assertion: "New" in what way? "Improved" how? "Better" than what? "Change" what in particular? "Hope" for what?

These words, seemingly of broad but actually of no particular meaning, are comforting in a way similar to the self-crafted wedding ceremony.

Whether or not a spouse is "respecting the other's space," is a matter of debate; whether or not he is being unfaithful is a matter of discernible fact. The author of his own marriage vows is like the supporter of the subjective assertion. He is voting for codependence. He neither makes nor requires an actual commitment. He'd simply like t ~ David Mamet

Maybe she would have done more good as a playwright than as a doctor, after all - clichés were like plaque in the arteries of the imagination, they clogged the sense of what was possible. Maybe if enough people had worked to demolish clichés, the world wouldn't have ended. ~ Charlie Jane Anders

[Seeing clearly] is not so difficult to achieve, and yet it is rather unusual. To my mind, it is less a question of an exalted or shrewd intelligence than of good sense, goodwill and a certain sort of courage to enable one to rise above both the pressures of one's environment and the natural inclination to close one's eyes to facts, a temptation that arises from our immediate interests and from the fear which problems inspire in us. A French essayist has said: 'What is terrible when you seek the truth, is that you find it.' You find it, and then you are no longer free to follow the biases of your personal circle, or to accept fashionable cliches. ~ Victor Serge

We do not serve a distant and detached God who spouts encouraging cliches safely from the sideline. Instead, he enters into our suffering. Jesus did it in the Incarnation and his Spirit does it in us now. God will never leave us alone in our suffering. ~ Rick Warren

I want to write something that means something to someone ... the reminds them of what a second, a moment, really is ... or that assures them that we are just as lost as they are. I want to write an emotion they are too fragile to let loose, so that my words can do the expression for them, the feeling for them. I want to write beyond the basics and the cliches ... I want to write you, I want to write a long walk on a starry night, I want to write an exhale or an inhale ... or suffocation.
I want to write as clear as my voice could be heard ... that is, if I had anything to say. ~ Augusten Burroughs

Then there's the silliest of all cliches, 'on a pace for' 'Pace' is a figment of the mathematician's imagination. ~ Leonard Koppett

Sometimes there's truth in old cliches. There can be no real peace without justice. And without resistance there will be no justice. ~ Arundhati Roy

After two years studying what rewrite men did with the facts I phoned them, I knew that journalism was essentially a task of stringing together seamlessly an endless series of cliches. ~ Russell Baker

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

The human voice often shatters the beauty of the most tender passions; and when we left Simla next day, and Maureen and Sunil used all the stock cliches to express their love, I was a little disappointed. But the poetry of life was in their bodies, not in their tongues. ~ Ruskin Bond

Only in art were there cliches; never in nature. There were no ordinary human beings. Everybody was born with surprise inside. ~ Jincy Willett

The champions of militant Islam are, of course, misogynists, woman-haters; they are also misologists
haters of reason. Their armed doctrine is little more than a chaotic penal code underscored by impotent dreams of genocide. And, like all religions, it is a massive agglutination of stock response, of cliches, of inherited and unexamined formulations. ~ Martin Amis

Isn't it what all librarians strive toward, at least in the movies and cliches? Silence, invisibility, nothing but a rambling cloud of old book dust. ~ Rebecca Makkai

Please, don't torture me with cliches. If you're going to try to intimidate me, have the courtesy to go away for a while, acquire a better education, improve your vocabulary, and come back with some fresh metaphors. ~ Dean Koontz

De-radicalisation begins by breaking down the logic which once seemed unassailable and rethinking what you are fighting for and why. That is hard to do when Islamists and Islamophobes feed off each other's hateful cliches. ~ Maajid Nawaz

Let's have some new cliches. ~ Samuel Goldwyn

It's the cliches that cause the trouble. A precise emotion seeks a precise expression. If what I feel is not precise than how should I call it love? ~ Jeanette Winterson

Instant communication is not communication at all but merely a frantic, trivial, nerve-wracking bombardment of cliches, threats, fads, fashions, gibberish and advertising. ~ Edward Abbey

Be a Student of the Game. Like most cliches of sport, this is profound. You can be shaped, or you can be broken. There is not much in between. Try to learn. Be coachable. Try to learn from everybody, especially those who fail. This is hard. Peers who fizzle or blow up or fall down, run away, disappear from the monthly rankings, drop off the circuit. ~ David Foster Wallace

I hate to repeat lines, to say the same damned thing. I try to rewrite cliches and make what I say sound fresh. ~ Gary McCord

Just as entropy is a measure of disorganization, the information carried by a set of messages is a measure of organization. In fact, it is possible to interpret the information carried by a message as essentially the negative of its entropy, and the negative logarithm of its probability. That is, the more probable the message, the less information it gives. Cliches, for example, are less illuminating than great poems. ~ Norbert Wiener

But we can expect the language history of the world to be revealing in another way. A language community is not just a group marked out by its use of a particular language: it is an evolving communion in its own right, whose particular view of the world is informed by a common language tradition. A language brings with it a mass of perceptions, cliches, judgments and inspirations. In some sense, then, when one language replaces another, a people's view of the world must also be changing. ~ Frank Wilczek

Christmas really is about all the cliches: health, happiness and love. A future with my family is the important thing ... to stay alive for them. ~ Sylvie Meis

She said things that'd have sounded like cliches--but when they're said by the woman you love in the middle of the night, it's different.

I said things that sounded like cowboy-movie junk, even when they were coming out of my mouth. But I meant them. ~ Kurt Busiek

Thomas Merton to write: The modern child may early in his or her existence have natural inclinations toward spirituality. The child may have imagination, originality, a simple and individual response to reality, and even a tendency to moments of thoughtful silence and absorption. All these tendencies, however, are soon destroyed by the dominant culture. The child becomes a yelling, brash, false little monster, brandishing a toy gun or dressed up like some character he has seen on television. His head is filled with inane slogans, songs, noises, explosions, statistics, brand names, menaces, ribaldries, and cliches. Then, when the child gets to school, he learns to verbalize, rationalize, to pace, to make faces like an advertisement, to need a car and in short, to go through life with an empty head conforming to others, like himself, in togetherness.3 ~ Brennan Manning

One of the great cliches of campaign journalism is the notion that American elections have long since ceased to be about issues and ideas. ~ Matt Taibbi

Modern Arabic literature achieved international recognition when Mahfouz was awarded the Nobel prize in 1988 ( ... ) Mahfouz also rendered Arabic literature a great service by developing, over the years, a form of language in which many of the archaisms and cliches that had become fashionable were discarded, a language that could serve as an adequate instrument for the writing of fiction in these times. ~ Denys Johnson-Davies

When a good idea is run through the filters and compressors of ordinary tunnel vision,it not only comes out reduced in scale and value but in it's new dogmatic configuration produces effects the opposite of those for which it originally intended. That is how the loving ideas of Jesus Christ became the sinister cliches of Christianity. That is why virtually every revolution in history has failed; the oppressed, as soon as they seize power, turn into the oppressors, resorting to totalitarian tactics to "protect the revolution." That is why minorities seeking the abolition of prejudice become intolerant , minorities seeking peace become militant, minorities seeking equality become self-righteous, and minorities seeking liberation become hostile (a tight asshole being the first symptom of self-repression). ~ Tom Robbins

Cliches and stereotypes such as "beatnik" or "hippie" have been invented for the antitechnologists, the antisystem people, and will continue to be. But one does not convert individuals into mass people with the simple coining of a mass term. ~ Robert M. Pirsig

It is a cliche that most cliches are true, but then like most cliches, that cliche is untrue. ~ Stephen Fry

It's hard to help those who don't want to help themselves."
"Someone who wants to help himself is possibly not the one who most needs help from others," Elsa objects. ~ Fredrik Backman

Our writers are full of cliches just as old barns are full of bats. There is obviously no rule about this, except that anything that you suspect of being a cliche undoubtedly is one and had better be removed. ~ Wolcott Gibbs

I think the French have a romantic cliche that Englishmen have great style, great music, irony and sense of humour. Well, sometimes cliches are true. ~ Josephine De La Baume

All those cliches, those things you hear about having a baby and motherhood - all of them are true. And all of them are the most beautiful things you will ever experience. ~ Penelope Cruz

And I still have other smothered memories, now unfolding themselves into limbless monsters of pain. Once, in a sunset-ending street of Beardsley, she turned to little Eva Rosen (I was taking both nymphets to a concert and walking behind them so close as almost to touch them with my person), she turned to Eva, and so very serenely and seriously, in answer to something the other had said about its being better to die than hear Milton Pinski; some local schoolboy she knew, talk about music, my Lolita remarked:
'You know what's so dreadful about dying is that you're completely on your own'; and it struck me, as my automaton knees went up and down, that I simply did not know a thing about my darling's mind and that quite possibly, behind the awful juvenile cliches, there was in her a garden and a twilight, and a palace gate - dim and adorable regions which happened to be lucidly and absolutely forbidden to me, in my polluted rags and miserable convulsions ... ~ Vladimir Nabokov

Comedy is hard to do. All the cliches about it are true. ~ Jeff Daniels

What I've come to realize I that I don't like action for action's sake. Mindless explosions, super close ups of combat and gore, and unnecessary effects make me zone out incredibly fast.
What I do love is a fight that is well choreographed and in which I actually care about the outcome. And hopefully not riddled with cliches.
Even more so, I have had a long, deep-seated appreciation for watching chicks kick ass. Watching some lone-wolf-type hero beat the crap out of the bad guys is okay, but watching a BAMF femme do it is 10000% times better. ~ J.M. Richards

Grief is a room without doors - but somehow, with its tinsel and cliches, Christmas finds a way in. ~ Simon Van Booy

You can't go back. What's done is done. Unrequited love is never easy. Time heals all wounds. I kept repeating such cliches to myself, hoping that they, like medicine, would take away the sting.

They didn't. ~ Alice J. Wisler

They think in terms of a sentimental ballad. And that's what terrifies you about them. It isn't their cruelty, it isn't even their shrewdness - it's their extraordinary naivete. Everything in their whole bloody world is a cliche. Everything is born out of a cliche, rests on a cliche, survives by a cliche. And they believe in the cliches - there's no hope ~ Jean Rhys

The intellectual, i n my sense of the word , is neither a pacifier nor a consensus-builder,but someone whose whole being is staked on a critical sense , a sense of being unwilling to accept easy formulas,or ready-made cliches, or the smooth, ever-so accommodating confirmations of what the powerful or conventional have to say, and what they do. Not just passively unwillingly, but actively willing to say so in public. This is not always a matter of being a critic of government policy, but rather of thinking of the intellectual vocation as maintaining a state of constant alertness, of a perpetual willingness not to let half-truths or received ideas steer one along. That this involves a steady realism, an almost athletic rational energy, and a complicated struggle to balance the problems of one's own selfhood against the demands of publishing and speaking out in the public sphere is what makes it an everlasting effort, constitutively unfinished and necessarily imperfect. Yet its invigorations and complexities, for me at least, make one the richer for it, even though it doesn't make one particularly popular. ~ Edward W. Said

Caleb came to his mother's side and helped her to her feet. "Besides, if you rest, then I am free to make love to Jacqueline."
"Caleb!" Jacqueline had been worried she would say the wrong thing. Instead, Caleb had put his foot in it.
But obviously all the cliches she'd ever heard about Italian sons were true. He really could do no wrong, for Mrs. D'Angelo shook her finger at him
but she said indulgently, "You are incorrigible."
"Ma, I'm just trying to get going on those grandchildren you want. ~ Christina Dodd

I think being a foreigner and talking about Hollywood allowed me to use some cliches and some references that an American would maybe not use. ~ Michel Hazanavicius

was driving up S 25th St., this afternoon, and saw this saying on a sign: "Look at life through the windshield, not the rear-view mirror."

Well, I pondered on that a bit. I sense a bit of danger with the idea of not checking out the rear view mirror on occasion. Like driving, it is important we know what has been and what could be coming from behind.

Some old cliches are around because they are true..."If you forget the past, you're bound to repeat it."...."Be prepared"... "Keep your eye on the prize."

Reflections ... Presence ... Aspirations ... ~ F. M. Proctor 'Madame Mim'

There was nothing that I ever did, no conscious effort to do one kind of behavior or another, I can't explain what it was, but I can explain that the thinking of the time was that we didn't want to emulate our heroes. That wasn't kosher. 'Don't try to play the old cliches, play like yourself' - that's what people were saying ~ Larry Coryell

Readers have pet-peeved the cliché to death. ~ Gossamersilverglow

What is at work in this report is the reduction of language to code. Cliches, coined by the state, become the only acceptable vocabulary. Everyone knows what to say and how to respond. It is scripted. Vocabulary shrinks so that the tyranny of nationalist rhetoric leaves people sputtering state-sanctioned slogans. ~ Chris Hedges

It is possible for music to be labeled "Christian" and be terrible music. It could lack creativity and inspiration. The lyrics could be recycled cliches. That "Christian" band could actually be giving Jesus a bad name because they aren't a great band. It is possible for a movie to be a "Christian" movie and to be a terrible movie. It may actually desecrate the art form in its quality and storytelling and craft. ~ Rob Bell

Buzzwords and cliches - those are stock in trade. There's nothing wrong with them. ~ Michael Nesmith

Here was the astounding fact: the race did go forward; the race did achieve; and in every way the race grew better. Progress through irrational and astounding blunders, whose outrageousness bedwarfed the wildest cliches of romance, was what Kennaston found everywhere. All this, then, also was foreplanned, just as all happenings at Storisende had been, in his puny romance; and the puppets, here to, moved as they thought of their own volition, but really in order to serve a denouement in which many of them had not any personal part or interest ... ~ James Branch Cabell

Bad movies and bad writing and easy cliches still manage to make us feel things toward each other. Part of me is disgusted by this. Part of me celebrates it. ~ Leslie Jamison

What I am is something unbearable for the world of journalism and the world of cliches. I'm a realist. ~ Gore Vidal

One of the more ignominious features of love was that you could only express it with cliches ... it made you sound like a fraud at a time when you were blazing with sincerity. ~ Lisa Kleypas

What I think is interesting is that the more you do, you have to invent a book of rules of what you can do and what you can't do. And the very real danger is that if your book of rules becomes a book of cliches. ~ Adrian Lyne

The cliches of a culture sometimes tell the deepest truths. ~ Faith Popcorn

I started a novel back in high school. It wasn't very good. It was the opposite of good. The writing itself wasn't too bad, and the characters were interesting. But the story was a mess, and it was full of fantasy cliches. Dwarf with an axe. Barbarian warrior. I don't ever think I'd bother finishing that. It's just not worth my time. ~ Patrick Rothfuss

Carelessness is not fatal to journalism, nor are cliches, for the eye rests lightly on them. But what is intended to be read once can seldom be read more than once; a journalist has to accept the fact that his work, by its very todayness, is excluded from any share in tomorrow. ~ Cyril Connolly

At the logic of fashion, such once-popular perversions as pedophilia and sodomy will become derided cliches, as amusing as pottery ducks on suburban walls. ~ J.G. Ballard

Metal is made up of many silly cliches, and Dio's songs rarely shied away from a good cheeseball lyric about medieval knights and crystal balls. But the amazing thing is, Dio the man never succumbed to the typical ravages of drugs, booze or hideous all-body tattoos. He never gained 75 pounds later in life or lost most of his voice through merciless shredding and ended it all playing county fairs for 19 drunk dudes in a barn before collapsing in a heap in a motel room in Jersey. There's a lesson in there somewhere. Or everywhere. ~ Mark Morford

So we all know the cliché characters: the Irish cop, the prostitute with a heart of gold, the writer with a drinking problem, and so forth. Clichés often exist for a reason, of course, and sometimes it's okay to use a tried and true character. But not always. Populate your stories with only stock characters and there won't be any reason to read your tales over anyone else's. ~ Craig Hart

Eating was a welcome distraction, not for us but for them. However the piles on the plates clashed (macaroni cheese sauce oozing orangely under the spinach salad), however sour the mixtures they made (runaway grapes rolling in the gravy!), our guests chewed to prove that their existence hadn't been diverted. For the price of a quick casserole, they bribed us into agreeing that this was God's plan, life was going on. Their cliches were breath mints: they wanted us to suck away to sweeten the bad taste our misfortune left in their mouths. And so we did. ~ Kirk Curnutt

People forget that keeping a band together is hard; man, it's really hard. All the cliches apply about living in each other's pockets; of it being a relationship, a marriage, a family. ~ Dean Wareham

First things first has always been my motto, mostly because it makes absolutely no sense - after all, if first things were second or third, they wouldn't be first things, would they? Still, cliches exist to comfort the feeble minded, not to provide any actual meaning. ~ Jeff Lindsay

When people express what is most important to them, it often comes out in cliches. That doesn't make them laughable; it's something tender about them. As though in struggling to reach what's most personal about them they could only come up with what's most public. ~ Terrence Malick

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

There are trappings of science fiction which I kind of embrace, but there are also cliches which I run from. ~ David Twohy

What really matters is that 'Black Swan' deploys and exaggerates all the cliches of earlier ballet movies, especially 'The Red Shoes,' another tale of a ballerina driven mad and suicidal. ~ Robert Gottlieb

During the twenty-one year rule of Amir Abdul Rahman (1880-1901), one of Afghanistan's more pro-British rulers, only one school was built in Kabul, and that was a madrassa. Condemned to play a passive part in an imperial Great Game, Afghanistan missed out on the indirect benefits of colonial rule, the creation of an educated class such as would supply the basic infrastructure of the postcolonial states of India, Pakistan and Egypt.

Afghanistan's resolute backwardness in the nineteenth and early twentieth centuries was appealing to Western romantics. Kipling, who was repelled by the educated Bengali, commended the Pashtun tribesmen- the traditional rulers of Afghanistan and also a majority among Afghans- for their courage, love of freedom, and sense of honour. These cliches about the Afghans, which would be amplified in our own time by American journalists and politicians, also had some effect on Muslims themselves. ~ Pankaj Mishra

The ground swell is what's going to sink you as well as being what buoys you up. These are cliches also, of course, and I'm sometimes interested in how much one can get away with. ~ Paul Muldoon

I'm aware of cliches and I'm aware of experiments that have been done and I'm aware of a kind of deadness to a lot of realism both in the language and in the structure of a book. ~ Jeffrey Eugenides

Do not put statements in the negative form.
And don't start sentences with a conjunction.
If you reread your work, you will find on rereading that a
great deal of repetition can be avoided by rereading and editing.
Never use a long word when a diminutive one will do.
Unqualified superlatives are the worst of all.
De-accession euphemisms.
If any word is improper at the end of a sentence, a linking verb is.
Avoid trendy locutions that sound flaky.
Last, but not least, avoid cliches like the plague. ~ William Safire

If you do something that's really original, you discover why everybody else does it the other way, usually. There's a reason cliches exist, 'cause they work. ~ Doug Liman

cliches are truisms and all truisms are true ~ Jack Kerouac

All the child-star cliches, I've tried very hard to avoid them all. ~ Macaulay Culkin

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