Paul Auster to Kathimerini: Time is running out, but I'm happy

Paul Auster wrote his first poem on a sunny spring day in 1956, when he was 9 years old. Happy to see the back of winter, he came up with a few verses while walking through a small park in his native South Orange, New Jersey. It was the worst poem ever written, the American writer says today, but it wasn't the words on the paper that mattered.

"I remember feeling connected to everything around me," he says, describing a feeling he still gets when putting words down on paper. "I feel connected to the world and other people. And things around me, just everything that is not me becomes part of me too. I've only just thought about it recently. I think that's why writers do it. Because it creates a feeling you can't get anywhere else," says one of the greatest living American writers today.

We meet at his home, an 1892 brownstone in Park Slope, Brooklyn, New York, where,...