Gladiator, the 2000 Ridley Scott movie, is based on a cliché. A successful man is betrayed by his own people for political/business reasons, his family is killed, and he begins a journey for revenge. It's a story that's been told a lot in many different forms. The reason that Gladiator was successful was because it was executed well. It had good writing, acting and directing. Had the writing been bad, or had the cast not been made up of good actors who did a good job, the movie could be written off as a "clichéd failure".
Even when a cliché is "bad", it can still be somewhat successful. I'd say that "write what you know", when taken literally, is the absolute worst advice in the world. This leads to main characters who are "Mary Sues" and boring as people, or a legion of marginally successful writers who are thrust into situations similar to the stories they write. Stephen King has built a career and made a fortune writing about himself.
I would classify myself as a semi-rabid King fan, but his non-horror work is by and large better than the scary stuff. Both The Shining and Misery are about writers (failing and successful, respectively) caught up in horror situations. Even though the characters are built on the pitfall many inexperienced writers fall into, they are quite successful; and The Shining is probably the scariest book I've read. But they do still run into problems. The characters aren't dynamic and can feel more like set pieces than actors. Unless the writer learns more about himself through the time it takes to finish the story, their character doesn't learn anything about himself. Thus, the resolution is less satisfying than it could be otherwise.
Time period has a lot to do with what is cliché. Invoking the Muses to help in the telling of stories was common in Greek and Roman days, and begins many ancient epic poems. Later Alexander Pope even used it successfully, in Imitations of Horace. Nowadays invoking of the Muses would relegate a writer to the fantasy genera, or a poet to the self-obsessed intelligentsia.
The final use of clichés that I think is important is in use of words and phrases. In the preceding paragraphs, I've used "nowadays", "thus" and "by and large". These are used often by many writers and people who speak. While there isn't anything actually wrong with them, they are familiar and not particularly engaging. In William Zinsser's "On Writing Well", he advocates the use of being original and surprising right down to diction. If you're using the same words that everyone else is using, there's nothing to stand out with. When your word choice is fresh, your writing is much more enjoyable to read.
Finally, the best way to think about clichés is like the use of distortion in rock music: when used by someone inexperienced, it serves to highlight the shortcomings; when used sparingly by someone who knows what their doing, it only serves to enhance the final product. But that is the good thing about writing. The rules aren't set in stone. Everything doesn't apply to everyone, and once you know the rules well, you can break them.
Edit: For a funny and mostly accurate take on common phrases, check out the "Some Werds" track from George Carlin's "Toledo Windowbox" comedy album.
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