The tetchiness in Paul Auster's voice as he is asked about the growing number of references to ageing in his work has only a little to do with the writer fighting the dying of the light.
He is no baby boomer screening the Grim Reaper's calls. The brown cigarillo stains on Auster's teeth suggest the New Yorker is far from flapped by pointers to his 62nd year.
The irritation comes from any attempt to boil down his work. Highlighting the prevalence of old men in recent Auster novels is just as annoying as asking whether he is best described as postmodern or metaphysical.
'I don't care what people say,' he says. 'I have no control over it. I don't think about it. But metaphysical? Fine. Why not?'
Discussing central themes risks poisoning his consciousness, Auster seems to be saying. He wants to keep his literary ideas in a part of his mind where they don't need words but can still seep into his writing. The less devoted Auster readers might recognise this sense of meaning being just beyond reach at the end of one of his novels.
Auster has no qualms about such responses, always preferring readers who take thoughtful confusion from his work to those who try to make a point too fine. His 12 novels as well as poems, screenplays, memoirs, pop songs and translations may be often ambiguous, but they are exactly what he wanted to write and have made him one of the world's best-known literary figures.
'Luckily I don't have to describe my work, and I don't,' he says as he stirs a black coffee in a hotel in Adelaide. 'I just do what I feel I have to do. I know that when I look back at what I've done, all the books I've published, there's quite a range of tones and approaches to telling stories - from what you might call rather bizarre philosophical novels to low-to-the-ground realistic novels, to absolutely fantastical, almost mythological tales, something like Mr Vertigo.