Quotes on writing clichéd metaphors

What writers & others say

“When I finally slept, I dreamed in headlines and bad newspeak: Predawn fires … shark-infested waters … steamy tropical jungles … the solid South … mean streets and densely wooded areas populated by ever-present lone gunmen, fiery Cuban, deranged Vietnam veteran, Panamanian strongman, fugitive financier, bearded dictator, slain civil rights leader, grieving widow, struggling quarterback, cocaine kingpin, drug lord, troubled youth, embattled mayor, totally destroyed by, Miami-based, bullet-riddled, high-speed chases, uncertain futures, deepening political crises sparked by massive blasts, brutal murders — badly decomposed — benign neglect and blunt trauma.

I woke up, nursing a dull headache…”

— Edna Buchanan, legendary cops reporter for the Miami Herald, in Miami, It’s Murder

“Strike (clichés) from your writing and choose fresh language and images — it’s the difference between heating up a TV dinner and levitating your pasta with magic mushrooms.”

— Cathy Copley, et. al., editors, The Writer’s Complex Style Seminar

“We read so that we can be moved by a new way of looking at things. A cliché is like a coin that has been handled too much. Once language has been overly handled, it no longer leaves a clear imprint.”

— Janet Fitch, author of White Oleander

“Let’s have some new clichés.”

— Samuel Goldwyn, independent producer and film mogul

“Clichés … dampen energy and cause eyes to skitter, and more importantly they offer nothing new — no ‘ah ha!’ moment of understanding. They are just old words, used in an old way.”

— Curt Hazlett, former managing editor, Portland Press Herald/Maine Sunday Telegram, in “Become an Inventor of Fresh Language: Avoid Clichés“

“If you want to get your points across with power, find replacements for those overworked phrases. Be the inventor of fresh language, not a perpetuator of stale phrases. It’s much more fun.”

— Curt Hazlett, former managing editor, Portland Press Herald/Maine Sunday Telegram, in “Become an Inventor of Fresh Language: Avoid Clichés“

“Avoid phrases that sound familiar to the ear. ‘Wan’ and ‘brouhaha’ are like little clowns dancing around your copy.”

— Anne Hull, Pulitzer Prize-winning reporter for The Washington Post

“There’s no shortage of metaphor. But just grabbing what’s there rather than creating fresh images will yield flat and hackneyed work.”

— Paula LaRocque, author, Championship Writing:50 Ways to Improve Your Writing

“Never use a metaphor, simile or other figure of speech which you are used to seeing in print.”

— George Orwell, British author of 1984 and Animal Farm

“Clichés and stereotypes float on top of our brains, easily making their way to first drafts. … weed out the tired, the poor, the huddled clichés yearning to be erased.”

— Chip Scanlan, senior faculty-writing, The Poynter Institute

“Any great truth can — and eventually will — be expressed as a cliché. A cliché is a sure and certain way to dilute an idea. For instance, my grandmother used to say, ‘The black cat is always the last one off the fence.’ I have no idea what she meant, but at one time, it was undoubtedly true.”

— Solomon Short, wit and aphorist

“When metaphors die — that is, pass from their literary homes in poems and books into the public domain (the process called lexicalization) — they become idioms: idioms being what we know so well that we see straight through it, as Shakespeare’s ‘Not a mouse stirring.’ Indeed, as Francis Sparshott has put it, ‘a language is nothing but a necropolis of dead metaphors.’ Or, as Stanislaw Lec, another aphorist, put it, ‘In the beginning there was the Word — at the end, just the Cliché.’”

— Bert O. States, Professor Emeritus of Dramatic Arts at the University of California, Santa Barbara

“Words have power; the words strung together in clichés have lost some or all of their power. Clichés are a sign of a mind at rest. Writing is work. Your job as a writer is to suck people into your world.”

— Sol Stein, author, playwright, poet, editor and publisher, in Dialogue for Writers

“Adam was the only man who, when he said a good thing, knew that nobody had said it before him.”

— Mark Twain, American author and wit

“If we don’t do it literally any more, we can’t do it literarily any more.”

— Ann Wylie, writing coach