Clichés

Novelist David Foster Wallace reads sports biographies despite constant disappointment over their banality. He wonders why athletes of genius are so incapable of describing their art, wondering if they are "stupid and shallow" or "somehow natively wise and profound, enlightened in the childlike way some saints and monks are enlightened.":

How can great athletes shut off the Iago-like voice of the self? How can they bypass the head and simply and superbly act? How, at the critical moment, can they invoke for themselves a cliché as trite as "One ball at a time" or "Gotta concentrate here," and mean it, and then do it? Maybe it's because, for top athletes, clichés present themselves not as trite but simply as true, or perhaps not even as declarative expressions with qualities like depth or triteness or falsehood or truth but as simple imperatives that are either useful or not and, if useful, to be invoked and obeyed and that's all there is to it.    (--from "Consider the Lobster")