John Steinbeck, Travels with Charley: In Search of America

"What good is the warmth of summer, without the cold of winter to give it sweetness."

"When I face the desolate impossibility of writing five hundred pages, a sick sense of failure falls on me, and I know I can never do it. Then gradually, I write one page and then another. One day's work is all I can permit myself to contemplate."