He wished he had inhabited more of his life, used it better, filled it fuller.

View your burden as a gift. It's the theme that has been given you to work with. Accept that and lean into it.

The first-person viewpoint is more enjoyable to write, because it lets me meander more freely, and it can reveal more of the character's self-delusions. Really all the advantages are with first-person, so I'm sorry I don't get to pick and choose.

I spend about a year between novels

I have spent so long erecting partitions around the part of me that writes - learning how to close the door on it when ordinary lfe intervenes, how to close the door on ordinary life when it's time to start writing again - that I'm not sure I could fit the two parts of me back together now.

If I waited till I felt like writing, I'd never write at all.

It seems to me that good novels celebrate the mystery in ordinary life, and summing it all up in psychological terms strips the mystery away