If your character is limited, you can't make him talk like he's a Literature Nobel Prize. You have to stoop to the characters' level to make him sound real. I'm reading Stephen King's "The Story of Lisey" where this is very noticeable.
You don't have to change your characters or your stories to avoid cliches. Not including cliches won't make a character seem any smarter. But something to keep in mind is that using cliches says a lot more about the writer than it does any character.
Yeah it says that they've written a character that uses cliches because its in character for them to do so... end of the day good characterisation means that there is a variety of character voices... so religiously avoiding cliches for every character for no reason other than because they are cliches is itself bad writing. Also you can bang the drum that cliches in any context are bad in your opinion... but as i said earlier the biggest names use them all the time...so something else to keep in mind is that in writing there a variety of opinions and options, not one right way For example - never start with the weather: "She was squinting at the thermometer in the white light coming through the window, beyond her in the drizzle the other high rises of co op city rose like grey turrets" Stephen King - the Running Man never start by breaking the fourth wall: Suppose that you and I were sitting in a quiet room... " Arthur Golden, Memoirs of a Geisha Never start with a flash back to the past: When Sam Devine and Jimmy Marcus were kids their fathers worked together at Coleman Candy." Dennis Lehane, Mystic river
I don't see your examples as cliches. I thought we were talking about using worn phrases that are considered cliches like "He froze like a deer in headlights." Your examples are more like suggestions for writers and I don't really have a problem with those being broken (honestly, they aren't rules I'm even familiar with) and would not think to myself that they were cliches when reading them. But the worn out phrases we've all heard a million times do stand out and not in a good way, in my opinion. I think there is a difference between cliche language and situations that could seem cliche. Cliche language I would drop. The things you mention I think are things a writer can work with and they won't come across cliche at all (if handled the right way).
even things like 'he froze like a deer in the headlights' can be characterful in dialogue if you have a character who speaks in cliche a lot, however even in narration they are common in bestselling name authors... there are numerous occasions in the jack reacher books where a bad guy 'fold like a bad hand' or fall like a puppet with its strings cut'
