He was full of cliché, but then a cliché is not a cliché if you have never heard it before; and our ordinary reader clearly had not and so was ready to greet each one with the same ecstasy it must have produced when it was first coined. For Cliché is pauperized Ecstasy.
—Chinua Achebe, Nigerian novelist, Anthills of the Savannah, 1987

Posted on January 2, 2001 at 7:04 PM

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