Orthodoxy is a corpse that doesn't know it's dead.
See Nancy Mitford’s quotation on aristocracy for a similar view: {167778}
People regurgitate the same old cliches and it becomes like a photocopy of a photocopy of something that's vaguely interesting.
I have a lot of sketches and ideas, but when you don't use them, they get stale.
Criticism is like many other things, it drags along after what has already been said and doesn't get out of its rut.
Am I overjoyed when somebody says, 'Oh, we're going to do another Jane Austen?' No - because there's never anything in it for me.
Mr. Fulbright hasn't said anything new or interesting or clever in five years; his intellectual well dried up the day after Walter Lippmann stopped writing his regular column.
it's a rare day when she speaks in anything but platitudes--all those exhausted phrases and hand-me-down ideas that cram the dump sites of contemporary wisdom
If it weren't for received ideas, the publishing industry wouldn't have any ideas at all.
Conventional wisdom is invariably out of date. Because in the time it has taken to become conventional - to become what everyone believes - the world has moved on. Conventional wisdom is a remnant of the past.
The proverb is something musty.
You could have a lot of money at your fingertips, the finest education and intellectual knowledge, but if you are governed by fear none of that will matter. You will remain tied to dead ideas and stale strategies. You will not be able to adapt. You will lose what you have.
People find ideas a bore because they do not distinguish between live ones and stuffed ones on a shelf.
If you are still thinking about a script after five or ten years, that's a sign that it's good - not that it's stale. And the opposite is true - if everyone wants to make your movie, that's a sign that it probably sucks.
Something was making him nibble at the edge of stale ideas as if his sturdy physical egotism no longer nourished his peremptory heart.
Sometimes I say working on a story in a writers' room is like saying the same word over and over and over again until it doesn't make sense anymore. Like, you say it until you don't know what you're saying.
The Republican Party seems unwilling and unable to offer solutions to the crises we are facing, other than pitching the same failed ideas that got us into the mess we are in the first place.