How we cite our quotes: (Part.Chapter.Paragraph)
Quote #4
Sunday, January 29, 1961. Yes, Joseph Addison, I hear and I will obey within Reason, for it appears that the Curiosity you speak of has in no Way abated. I have found many Readers more interested in what I wear than in what I think, more avid to know how I do it than in what I do. In regarding my Work, some Readers profess greater Feeling for what it makes than for what it says. Since a Suggestion from the Master is a Command not unlike Holy Writ, I shall digress and comply at the same Time. (2.1.122)
Because he admires Joseph Addison, who thought it was important to come out with who you are as an author right off the bat, Steinbeck decides to follow suit and give us some deets about who he is. The thing is, he doesn't actually tell us anything important about who he is inside. It's primarily about how he looks, how tall he is in comparison to other family members—that kind of stuff. But hey, it's what he thinks the public wants to know, we guess.
Quote #5
Thus far with Addison's injunction, but my Reader has me back in that New Hampshire picnic place. As I sat there fingering the first volume of The Spectator and considering how the mind usually does two things at once that it knows about and probably several it doesn't, a luxurious car drove in and a rather stout and bedizened woman released a rather stout and bedizened Pomeranian of the female persuasion. (2.1.125)
Steinbeck is really good at toggling from lofty and fancy-sounding thoughts to pretty ridiculous topics, and this is a prime example. And so, all his deep thoughts about writing and keeping himself honest and transparent as an author give way to the tyranny of a "bedizened Pomeranian."
Quote #6
On the long journey doubts were often my companions. I've always admired those reporters who can descend on an area, talk to key people, ask key questions, take samplings of opinions, and then set down an orderly report very like a road map. What I set down here is true until someone else passes that way and rearranges the world in his own style. In literary criticism the critic has no choice but to make over the victim of his attention into something the size and shape of himself. (2.3.61)
Now we're back to pretty insightful musings about writing and how an author can shape the "truth" that s/he presents to readers. Of course, we know that Steinbeck did not stick to the literal truth as often as people might have originally assumed when he wrote Travels with Charley, and this little "Well, what is truth anyway?" speech might be a little wink in that direction, no?