Aging & Wisdom Quote by Wolcott Gibbs

Gibbs lands the insult with the breezy confidence of someone who’s spent a lifetime watching talented people sabotage themselves with lazy phrasing. The line about “old barns” and “bats” isn’t just a comic image; it’s an ecosystem. Cliches don’t arrive one at a time as isolated mistakes. They roost. They multiply in the dark corners of a draft where the writer stops looking closely, and soon the whole structure is inhabited by borrowed language.

His “rule” is a fake rule, the kind editors use when they know the real standard can’t be reduced to a checklist: taste. “Anything that you suspect…undoubtedly is one” sounds authoritarian, but it’s actually a bet on the writer’s ear. If your internal alarm goes off, that’s not neurosis; it’s craft. Gibbs is telling you to treat that faint embarrassment as diagnostic. Cliches aren’t merely unoriginal. They’re the moment your prose stops making contact with lived perception and starts replaying prepackaged sentiment.

Context matters here: Gibbs was a New Yorker fixture, part of a magazine culture that prized compression, surprise, and the clean snap of the right word. In that world, a cliche isn’t harmless decor; it’s professional negligence, a signal that the writer is leaning on communal autopilot instead of doing the hard work of naming what they actually mean. The wit is surgical, but the intent is practical: revise until the language can’t be mistaken for anyone else’s.