Unimaginative Writing Quotes

I hate it when, by page 30, I know what the lead's going to do and then what the bad guy's gonna do. Mostly it's just scripts by the numbers where nothing's surprising, nothing's interesting.

It's really rare in TV not to think, 'Well, I've seen a version of this before.'

There is nothing wrong with wanting to publish - or read - books that have a wide potential audience. But it does generate a certain plodding sameness of tone and subject matter that plagues a lot of contemporary American fiction.

I think we have become oversaturated with tired fictional narratives.

The English may not always be the best writers in the world, but they are incomparably the best dull writers.

Too many new writers dress up old cliches.

Sadly, for those who are busy sawing off their feet to escape the trap of cliches, every story is chock full of them and sometimes depends on an especially hoary one.

I hate dream sequences in movies and T.V. shows generally for their heavy-handed symbolism and storytelling tediousness.

The problem with the literary hothouse of New York City is that people spend so much time looking in the mirror. They go to parties with people who are just like them, and they write novels about people who are just like them. It's limiting.

People love cliches. If you can give people cliches, that's very good TV, then.

There are phrases that are totally cliche that we, as songwriters, owe it to ourselves to not use again.

Some of those early roles were unactable. Even Laurence Olivier couldn't have done anything with them. The dialog ran to cardboard passages such as, 'I love you. You can rely on me, darling. I'll wait.' It was all I could do to keep from adding, 'With egg on my face.'

The things we always disengage with are one-sided stories or one-sided characters. They're very boring. When you feel like you're being hit over the head, you disengage.

I am a little suspicious of industry paradigms. I feel like so many movies and TV shows feel so familiar because of over-reliance on these paradigms.

There are writers who do start doing the same thing again and again and almost inevitably fall into self-parody.

We don't want to watch boring characters.

Our writers are full of cliches just as old barns are full of bats. There is obviously no rule about this, except that anything that you suspect of being a cliche undoubtedly is one and had better be removed.

I'm terrified of cliches.

Last, but not least, avoid cliches like the plague.

Sometimes in television, if there are storylines that are oft-told, people can be hypercritical of them.

There's a certain exhaustion that sets in when screenwriters are approaching sequels, and they start to lean on crutches - those same old wacky characters!

I do find myself surprised by the comedy shows that seem to have the same joke week in week out.