Hackneyed Quotes

#1. Air power speaks a strategic language so new that translation into the hackneyed idiom of the past is impossible.

Alexander P. De Seversky

#2. Yet even the most hackneyed, shopworn science fiction or fantasy tale will feel startling and fresh to a naive reader who doesn't know the milieu is just like the one used in a thousand other stories.

Orson Scott Card

#3. Alienation, I suppose, can't be hackneyed because it will always exist.

Mike Birbiglia

#4. I question every word; I write 'the' and immediately feel scorn. It's such an ordinary word - everybody uses it - why can't I come up with something original? In the sunlight, every single word seems hackneyed.

Jeff Lindsay

#5. The men leaned back on their heels, put their hands in their trousers-pockets, and proclaimed their views with the booming profundity of a prosperous male repeating a thoroughly hackneyed statement about a matter of which he knows nothing whatever.

Sinclair Lewis

#6. There is no idea so stupid or hackneyed that a sufficiently-talented writer can't get a good story out of it.

Lawrence Watt-Evans

#7. But that expression of 'violently in love' is so hackneyed, so doubtful, so indefinite, that it gives me very little idea. It is as often applied to feelings which arise from a half-hour's acquaintance, as to a real, strong attachment.

Jane Austen

#8. What I dislike is conventional realism - a system of gestures, descriptions, psychological revelations that was once a vital way of representing the world but has become hackneyed through endless repetition. I'd argue that a conventional realist isn't a realist at all, but a falsifier of the real.

Steven Millhauser

#9. What audiences end up with word-wise is a hackneyed, completely derivative copy of old Hollywood romances, a movie that reeks of phoniness and lacks even minimal originality.

Kenneth Turan

#10. My coach once told me "there's no "I" in "team." I responded there's also no "I" in "hackneyed." Then I had to run 12 laps.

Lev L. Spiro

#11. There were no whys in a person's life, and very few hows. In the end, in search of useful wisdom, you could only come back to the most hackneyed concepts, like kindness, forbearance, infinite self patience.

Chad Harbach

#12. For the hackneyed art of lying without injury to anyone, Rushbrook, to his shame, was proficient.

Elizabeth Inchbald

#13. Writing is a form of art. Do not use New Times Roman or Arial because it's boring and hackneyed.

Natalya Vorobyova

#14. Even hackneyed and commonplace maxims are to be used, if they suit one's purpose: just because they are commonplace, every one seems to agree with them, and therefore they are taken for truth.

Aristotle.

#15. Anger has become one of the trendiest emotions of all. In moderation it can be a righteous force for constructive change. But its hackneyed omnipresence means the vast majority of its outbreaks are trivial. The paucity of colorful obscenities is aggravated by an abundance of frivolous fury.

Rob Brezsny

#16. Nothing is more hackneyed than the liberal dogma that shock value confers automatic importance on an artwork.

Camille Paglia

#17. Sometimes I go to the beach and stand facing the wind, which I wish were icy, colder than we know it in these parts. I wish it would blow all the hackneyed words, all the insipid habits of language out of me so that I could come back with a cleansed mind, cleansed of the banalities of the same talk.

Pascal Mercier

#18. I really want to be known for my work. That sounds like such a ... cliche, and I've thought about how else I can say it to make it sound less hackneyed. But that's what it comes down to ... I know people are interested in these things.

Delroy Lindo

#19. Yet if she did not quite exist in the full flood of sunlight, which is the hackneyed metaphor for good health, she was comfortably and safely far away from that abyssal darkness down into which she had nearly strayed.

William Styron

#20. Fifty years," I hackneyed, "is a long time."
"Not when you're looking back at them," she said. "You wonder how they vanished so quickly.

Isaac Asimov

#21. Cougar jokes are now as hackneyed as airplane food.

Felipe Esparza

#22. Would it be too hackneyed to wonder where it all went so wrong? Kitty's

Harlan Coben

#23. I like the lad who, when his father thought To clip his morning nap by hackneyed phrase Of vagrant worm by early songster caught, Cried, Served him right! it's not at all surprising; The worm was punished, sir, for early rising!

John Godfrey Saxe

#24. I never take any notice of reviews-unless a critic has thought up some new way of describing me. That old one about my lizard eyes and anteater nose and the way I sleep my way through pictures is so hackneyed now.

Robert Mitchum

#25. I detest jargon of every kind, and sometimes I have kept my feelings to myself, because I could find no language to describe them in but what was worn and hackneyed out of all sense and meaning. ~ Marianne Dashwood

Jane Austen

#26. I know not that there is anything in nature more soothing to the mind than the contemplation of the moon, sailing, like some planetary bark, amidst a sea of bright azure. The subject is certainly hackneyed; the moon has been sung by poet and poetaster. Is there any marvel that it should be so?

William Gilmore Simms

#27. 'Pay it forward' has become a hackneyed concept, but I truly believe in it, and it gives me huge satisfaction to be able to help writers in a measurable way.

Victoria Strauss

#28. Sometimes I have kept my feelings to myself, because I could find no language to describe them in but what was worn and hackneyed out of all sense and meaning

Jane Austen

#29. I strenuously object to the very word "grotesque" which has become hackneyed to the point of nausea ... I would prefer my music to be described as "Scherzo-ish" in quality, or else by three words describing the various degrees of the Scherzo - whimsicality, laughter, mockery.

Sergei Prokofiev

#30. Obsessing on evil is boring. Rousing fear is a hackneyed shtick. Wallowing is despair is a bad habit. Indulging in cynicism is akin to committing a copycat crime.

Rob Brezsny

#31. Just because that was the start of a thousand sentimental stories didn't mean that it didn't actually happen.

Iain M. Banks