I think I read this in a Calvin Trillin book. The narrator was the sports-page editor of a newspaper somewhere -- I want to say it was the Chicago Tribune, but I'm not at all confident of that. They had a guy who'd been reporting baseball games for over fifty years, and his articles were dripping with baseball-game-reporting cliches. The narrator asked him to stop using so many cliches. The reporter said, son, they are my cliches.

Not quite the same thing, but pretty close...?