Cliche Quotes

“Clary screamed out loud as he fell like a stone-
And landed lightly on his feet just in front of her. Clary stared with her mouth open as he rose up out of a shallow crouch and grinned at her. "If I made a joke about just dropping in," he said, "would you write me off as a cliché?”
― Cassandra Clare, City of Ashes

“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, Story: Substance, Structure, Style, and the Principles of Screenwriting

“All novels are sequels; influence is bliss.”
― Michael Chabon

“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, This Is Water: Some Thoughts, Delivered on a Significant Occasion, about Living a Compassionate Life

“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

“Mi casa es su casa. Literally. I'm pretty sure your dad owns it.”
― Jennifer Lynn Barnes, Raised by Wolves

“As an opener, I'd like to state that elves are certainly NOT cliché. It doesn't matter if they all have pointy ears, or they all live a long time, or even if they all like forests. It doesn't matter if they're short or tall or both. It doesn't matter if they're related to forest spirits or even angels. Regardless of how many elves are like one another or how many elves appear in how many books, elves are NOT cliché.

Why?

Well, for one, an elf is a creature. How can a creature be a cliché? Is a human cliché? They certainly do appear in a lot of books! How about dragons? Now there's a popular subject! Are dragons cliché as well? Well what about vampires too? Or werewolves? Or bats? Or rabbits? Or mice? Or owls? Or crows? Cats??”
― Robert Fanney

“Our lack of originality is something we usefully forget as we hunch over our—to us—ever-fascinating lives. My friend M., leaving his wife for a younger woman, used to complain, “People tell me it’s a cliché. But it doesn’t feel like a cliché to me.” Yet it was, and is. As all our lives would prove, if we could see them from a greater distance—from the viewpoint, say, of that higher creature imagined by Einstein. ”
― Julian Barnes, Nothing to Be Frightened Of

“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, The Empathy Exams

“Vale más partir del cliché que llegar a él.”
― Alfred Hitchcock

“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, Keep the Aspidistra Flying

“... I retraced my steps, walked up to her, and in another moment would have certainly said, "Madam!" if I had not known that that exclamation had been made a thousand times before in all Russian novels of high life. It was that alone that stopped me.”
― Fyodor Dostoyevsky, White Nights

“Out of all the neighborhoods in Manhattan, Soho in particular had the charged atmosphere of a movie set, populated with passersby who looked like extras from Central Casting, so perfectly did they fit into this environment. There was the feeling of everything being not quite real, or too perfectly cliched to actually be true, and it began to rain in a fine, misty drizzle from a black patent leather sky.”
― Candace Bushnell, Lipstick Jungle

“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, Once Upon a Road Trip

“Movie Cliche #12: The Moral. A character states the obvious and everybody gets the point.”
― Connie Willis, Remake

“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

“This is what happened.”
― Douglas Fairbairn, Shoot

“In French printer's jargon, cliche (which mimicked the sound of a mold striking molten metal) was a synonym for stereotype, which in turn evolved from the Greek for "solid impression." A stereotype was a printing plate that duplicated typography and that was used by the printer in lieu of the original.
So a cliche is a word or phrase used over and over again in lieu of the original.”
― Constance Hale, Sin and Syntax: How to Craft Wickedly Effective Prose

“History is written by all sorts, victors, losers and neutral observers. Cliches are written by all sorts as well.”
― Unknownimous

“Instead of this dumb rain check idea, I'll write a song about a guy who likes a girl who works in a bookstore but he won't tell her."
"And the clichés keep coming," he grumbled.
"Quit being one, then," she said.”
― Susan Wiggs, The Lost and Found Bookshop

“I drop down into a black lacquered chair and try not to burn to ashes under my twin cousins' withering stares. Things I wish I could say to them. Don't you think this is a little cliché, being mean to the outsider? Relational aggression is a terrible plague among young women. When did torturing others become a rite of passage?”
― Emiko Jean, Tokyo Ever After

“Mas naquele momento, com aquele par romântico, era como se todos os clichês do mundo estivessem aglomerados, em fila no seu peito. E em algum lugar a distância, ela jurava que estava ouvindo fogos de artifício.”
― Victoria Guimarães, De Malas Prontas

“If you only go around once in life then, why has that one gone around more than once?”
― Brian Spellman, We have our difference in common 2.

“Cliche is at the root of audience dissatisfaction, and like a plague spread through ignorance, it now infects all story media.”
― Robert McKee, Story: Substance, Structure, Style, and the Principles of Screenwriting

“If that was a cliché, it was the truest cliché that ever was.”
― Gina Marinello-Sweeney, Peter

“After a late-night library trip I’d call her and say, ‘Look at the moon.’ Black boys rarely speak on the poet’s muse so these twilight tropes seemed original – the moon is glowing new when seen through eyes deprived of cliché.”
― Derek Owusu, That Reminds Me

“It starts to turn out that the vapider the AA cliche, the sharper the canines of the real truth it covers.”
― David Foster Wallace, Infinite Jest

“To idealise: all writing is a campaign against cliche. Not just cliches of the pen but cliches of the mind and cliches of the heart. When I dispraise, I am usually quoting cliches. When I praise, I am usually quoting the opposed qualities of freshness, energy and reverberation of voice.”
― Martin Amis, The War Against Cliché: Essays and Reviews 1971-2000

“Rose is the epitome of a hard-scrabble professional, complete with a practiced resting bitch face. Dark, smoky makeup accentuates her piercing hazel eyes that bore into anyone catching her gaze. Her short auburn hair perches in an all-business cut, with a slight flourish over her right cheek. A chain made of thick silver links adorns her neck, complete with a prominent cross. Is she a devout Christian or will it all be a ploy to curry favor with the salt-of-the-earth jurors in this county? A tight, merciless navy-blue skirt and blazer stress her athletic frame. She is all business, and in it to win it.”
― Michael Stockham

“At the risk of sounding like an alphahole cliche,' he said without looking at her as he set the skillet on the stove, 'I like seeing you in my shirt.”
― Sarah J. Maas, House of Earth and Blood