There is no idea so stupid or hackneyed that a sufficiently-talented writer can't get a good story out of it.
My chief virtue (or if you like, defect) has been a tireless lifelong search for an original, individual musical idiom. I detest imitation, I detest hackneyed devices.
Alienation, I suppose, can't be hackneyed because it will always exist.
Cougar jokes are now as hackneyed as airplane food.
I detest imitation, I detest hackneyed devices.
So one must be resigned to being a clock that measures the passage of time, now out of order, now repaired, and whose mechanism generates despair and love as soon as its maker sets it going? Are we to grow used to the idea that every man relives ancient torments, which are all the more profound because they grow comic with repetition? That human existence should repeat itself, well and good, but that it should repeat itself like a hackneyed tune, or a record a drunkard keeps playing as he feeds coins into the jukebox.
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.
Air power speaks a strategic language so new that translation into the hackneyed idiom of the past is impossible.
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.
Nothing is more hackneyed than the liberal dogma that shock value confers automatic importance on an artwork.
That human existence should repeat itself, well and good, but that it should repeat itself like a hackneyed tune, or a record a drunkard keeps playing as he feeds coins into the jukebox. . .
