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

“Assume' makes an 'ass' out of 'u' and 'me'.”
― Karen Marie Moning, Darkfever

“We're all clichés, all following scripts that have been written and played out long before we landed the role.”
― Jonathan Tropper, One Last Thing Before I Go

“about clichés. Avoid them like the plague.”
― Khaled Hosseini, The Kite Runner

“Cut these words and they would bleed; they are vascular and alive.”
― Ralph Waldo Emerson

“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, The Blindfold

“The cliché comes not in what you shoot but in how you shoot it.”
― David duChemin, Within the Frame: The Journey of Photographic Vision

“rather babble away and at least partially express something difficult than reproduce impeccable clichés”
― Thomas Mann, The Magic Mountain

“It never rains but it pours”
― L.M. Montgomery, The Blue Castle

“Lavina led me to an abandoned warehouse. I think that at some point someone decreed that all clandestine meetings must be held in one. Woe to the criminal overlord who lives in a city thriving with commerce, with no empty warehouses to be found. He probably needs to build one, just to have a place to arrange late-night meetings. (Bewitched)”
― Kelley Armstrong, Tales of the Otherworld

“There are no atheists in the foxhole.”
― Ernie Pyle

“Life is so ridiculously clichéd sometimes I wonder why we bother living it when nothing is ever a surprise any more.”
― Holly Bourne, How Hard Can Love Be?

“Really?" Risa said, disgusted. "'What do we have here?' Is that your best line? If you're going to attack a defenseless girl in an alley, at least try not to be cliché about it.”
― Neal Shusterman, UnSouled

“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

“This is a familiar syndrome. There is a stage with every drawing or painting when it looks banal and clumsy. It's worth pushing through that, working through the cliché to find out what made it a cliché in the first place.”
― Antony Sher, Year Of The King

“The first man who compared woman to a rose was a poet, the second, an imbecile”
― Gérard de Nerval

“The trouble is, this is trouble that you welcome. You realize there is a reason clichés exist, and you would happily have your breath taken away, three seconds at a time, maybe more, by this woman.”
― Caleb Azumah Nelson, Open Water

“She has a quiet paroxysm.
Now remember that these are the days
before digital pornography.
There is no cliché of how women are supposed to orgasm,
no idea in their heads of how they are supposed to sound when they climax.
Mrs. Daldry’s first orgasms could be very quiet,
organic, awkward, primal. Or very clinical. Or embarrassingly natural.
But whatever it is, it should not be a cliché, a camp version
of how we expect all women sound when they orgasm.
It is simply clear that she has had some kind of release.”
― Sarah Ruhl, In the Next Room, or the Vibrator Play

“Deeply exciting, though, cliché was, as a concept. It was truth misted by overexpression, wasn't it, like a structure seen in a fog, something waiting to be re-felt, re-seen. Something dainty fumbled at through thick gloves. Cliché was true, obviously, which was why it had become cliché in the first place; so true that cliché actually protected you from its own truth by being what it was, nothing but cliché.”
― Ali Smith, The Accidental

“An artist's job is to make new clichés.”
― Grayson Perry , Playing to the Gallery

“...and I know it’s not terribly original, it’s nothing earth-shattering, I know it’s all been said a thousand times, but that may be true of everything in life that really matters, and anyhow, just because something isn’t original doesn’t mean it isn’t true, in fact maybe that’s how the truth usually is – monotonous, boring, not original at all.”
― Christos Ikonomou, Το καλό θα 'ρθει από τη θάλασσα

“Like enacting clichés, sometimes you just gotta be a little basic. Balance that fuckin’ pH to a proper 7.”
― A.D. Aliwat, In Limbo

“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, Full of Noises: Conversations with Tom Service

“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, Full of Noises: Conversations with Tom Service

“La estética latinoamericana es la estética del cliché.”
― Margarita García Robayo, Hasta que pase un huracán

“It's very... christmas movie. Like the cheesy ones on channel 5, where some frosty bitch from the city breaks up with a smarmy lawyer, and has a breakdown, so has to go home to Leafy Glade, Alabama, where she reunites with the humble carpenter she dated in high school, and ends up working as a mall elf, and rediscovers the true meaning of Christmas.”
― Juno Dawson, Stay Another Day