I wanted to get the tears out of the way so I could act sensibly. - Joan Didion

Writers are always selling somebody out.

"We live entirely, especially if we are writers, by the imposition of a narrative line upon the disparate images, by the "ideas" with which we have learned to freeze the shifting phantasmagoria which is our actual experience."

What's so hard about that first sentence is that you're stuck with it. Everything else is going to flow out of that sentence. And by the time you've laid down the first two sentences, your options are all gone.