Cliché Quotes

I often warn people: Somewhere along the way, someone is going to tell you, 'There is no I in team.' What you should tell them is, 'Maybe not. But there is an I in independence, individuality and integrity.

~ George Carlin

Think of the old cliché about the mind being 'an excellent servant but a terrible master'. This, like many clichés, so lame & banal on the surface, actually expresses a great & terrible truth.

~ David Foster Wallace

Your fear of becoming a cliche is what turns you into one. If you remove the fear, we are all really walking contradictions, hypocrites and paradoxical cliches

~ Mohadesa Najumi

As a rule of thumb, I'd say one cliché per [Romance]--and then be damn sure you can make it work. But if you're going to try to write the virginal amnesiac twin disguised as a boy mistaken for the mother (or father depending how well the disguise works) of a secret baby, honey, you better have some serious skills. Or seek therapy.

~ Nora Roberts

This life is quite a rave- few heartaches, some long waits, altering faiths & breaking cliches!

~ Jasleen Kaur Gumber

Oh I know it's cliché but yeah they say that great men make it in-To places few others who even do take the risk've ever been

~ Criss Jami

Spring, spring! Bytuene Mershe ant Averil, when spray biginneth to spring! When shaws be sheene and swards full fayre, and leaves both large and longe! When the hounds of spring are on winter’s traces, in the spring time, the only pretty ring time, when the birds do sing, hey-ding-a-ding ding, cuckoo, jug-jug, pu-wee, ta-witta-woo! And so on and so on and so on. See almost any poet between the Bronze Age and 1805.

~ George Orwell

There are no atheists in the foxhole.

~ Ernie Pyle

All novels are sequels, influence is bliss.

~ Michael Chabon

Pure wisdom is the 'fruit of life' banal platitudes are the 'bane of existence'.

~ Criss Jami

I am so tired of this gothic crap,” I muttered. “Just once, I want to meet the villain in a cheerful, brightly lit room. Possibly one with kittens.

~ Seanan Mcguire

You’re different, and I know that’s probably the most cliché response ever given, but it’s the truth. When I look at you, it’s as if I’m reading a novel. No matter how much time I spend studying your pages, there will always be more for me to learn, deeper layers of complexity to baffle me, and plot twists that’ll leave me speechless.

~ Caroline George

Do research. Feed your talent. Research not only wins the war on cliche, it's the key to victory over fear and it's cousin, depression.

~ Robert Mckee

An artist's job is to make new clichés.

~ Grayson Perry

Plenty of masterpieces are just one cliché after another, Mozart for example, but that's quite natural, because if you think about it, two clichés that have met one another can beget the most original and profound effect.

~ Thomas Ades

Plenty of masterpieces are just one cliché after another, Mozart for example, but that's quite natural, because if you think about it, two clichés that have never met each other before can beget the most original and profound effect.

~ Thomas Ades

The closest I ever got to Dragonlance and Forgotten Realms was when I bought the box game set for the latter (I think this was before the novels came out). I well recall this—we were living in James Bay, in Victoria. We opened the box up and took out the maps while sitting in a Mexican restaurant. Ten minutes later I was as close as I have ever been to publicly burning someone else’s creation…What bothered us was the reworking of every fantasy cliché imaginable, all in one package now, and none of it made sense.

~ Steven Erikson

As cliché as it might sound, I'd rather lose than win by cheating. The latter is a much deeper, more personal loss in that one is admittedly whispering to himself his lack of competence. His cheating then begets more cheating, as he is ever-privately, ever-subconsciously insulting himself; thus, gradually deteriorating any remaining confidence.

~ Criss Jami

It is precisely, if paradoxically, because reversal is in the service of repetition (so as to ensure, alongside its companion strategies, a dizzying proliferation of citations) that it gains a subversive power rather than remain a mere dependent (and thus conservative) form of social discourse. Reversal plays a double role in this novel (MONSIEUR VENUS), for it is not only a formal strategy bearing on citation, but itself a citation as well; one more cliché mobilized from the fin-de-siecle reserve.

~ Janet Beizer

cliche but accurate: Kick a football, then ask it whether it meant to fly. All action demands an equal and opposite reaction. You can't blame an object battered by inertial forces; you can't blame me, bouncing through the pinball machine of life.

~ Robin Wasserman

Don't bother to ring a bell in the ear that doesn't listen. Move to another ear, and if he doesn't listen to your bell, sit back and listen to his nemesis.

~ Michael Bassey Johnson

I remember thinking how easy it is to speak in clichés, to steal a line from pulp fiction and let it fall. We can only hover around the inexpressible with our words anyway, and there is comfort in saying what we have heard before.

~ Siri Hustvedt

Users of clichés frequently have more sinister intentions beyond laziness and conventional thinking. Relabelling events often entails subtle changes of meaning. War produces many euphemisms, downplaying or giving verbal respectability to savagery and slaughter.

~ Patrick Cockburn

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

You make me love books and the words inside them, because they talk about you. I know they do, they tell me that I love you, not as cliché as I write it, but in the warmest, deepest, calmest words I could ever read. I love you, like the books say it. And I'll find a better way to say it one day.

~ Nema Al-Araby

There is an enduring freshness in what remains strange and obscure which the cliches of greatness can only evoke nostalgia for.

~ Bauvard

I know, I know…there’s something cliché about that. The heroine initially wanting to clobber a protagonist male, but later realizing that he’s grown on her and she actually really likes him. Technically, I’m not supposed to find that appealing. But maybe real life is a lot more cliché than anyone wants to admit. Or maybe there’s just a fine, subjective line between the cliché and the poetic.

~ Angela N. Blount

Mathematics is not a deductive science - that's a cliche. When you try to prove a theorem, you don't just list the hypotheses, and then start to reason. What you do is trial and error, experimentation, guesswork.

~ Paul R. Halmos

Literary truth is not the truth of the biographer or the reporter, it’s not a police report or a sentence handed down by a court. It’s not even the plausibility of a well-constructed narrative. Literary truth is entirely a matter of wording and is directly proportional to the energy that one is able to ­impress on the sentence. And when it works, there is no stereotype or cliché of popular literature that resists it. It reanimates, revives, subjects ­everything to its needs.

~ Elena Ferrante

about clichés. Avoid them like the plague.

~ Khaled Hosseini

I will never stop loving you, I know it’s a cliché but it’s damn true.

~ Annie Fisher

The cliché comes not in what you shoot but in how you shoot it.

~ David Duchemin

I'm the old type setter who gets his blood poisoned from the ink.

~ Walt Holcombe

We both smile at the classic misunderstanding. It’s all so cliché-ridden, it’s embarrassing. I wish our story could have some more original twists and turns. Maybe one of us will turn into a vampire or something.

~ Stacy Kramer

Outside the box is an overused cliche which goes nowhere near far enough. In fact, there are so many politicians and salesmen thinking outside the box these days that I am convinced that all of their boxes are completely empty!

~ Lance Greenfield

I'm very much aware of the dangers of becoming a cliche. Mr. Anger, someone who gets meaner, angrier on record.

~ Trent Reznor