Many children are natural fantasists, I think, perhaps because their imaginations have yet to be clobbered into submission by experience. When you’re 10, there is still an outside chance that you might find Narnia behind the wardrobe, that the fur coats could turn into fir trees. The state of childhood resonates with life inside a fantasy novel. If you have no control over how you spend large chunks of your day, or are at the mercy of flawed giant beings, then the desire to bend the laws of the world by magic is strong and deep. I don’t mean that kids can’t distinguish fantasy from reality — the playground bully will clarify the matter gratis — but fantasy offers a logic to which kids are receptive, and escapism for which kids are hungry. As an adult, I read less fantasy (aside from bedtime-story duties), but perhaps nomenclature plays a role here, too: both fantasy and S.F. have made inroads into literary fiction and influences even those novels whose imprint logo is reassuringly conservative. Murakami’s “Wind-Up Bird Chronicle” isn’t regarded as a fantasy novel, but the plot is propelled by occult magic. Kazuo Ishiguro’s masterly “Never Let Me Go” is old-money dystopian S.F., as is Margaret Atwood’s “The Handmaid’s Tale” and Cormac McCarthy’s “The Road.” Philip K. Dick would recognize both Michael Chabon’s “Yiddish Policemen’s Union” and Philip Roth’s “Plot Against America” as alternate-history S.F. in the grandest, proudest tradition. We imbibe more S.F. and fantasy than we notice. On my last visit to New York, by the by, I had a dinner with a group of literary writers, and the whole main course was spent in earnest and learned discussion of “A Game of Thrones.”

Do you have a favorite character or hero from children’s literature?

Edmund from the Narnia books is an interesting one. In “The Lion, the Witch and the Wardrobe” he commits an act of exquisite treachery by refusing to corroborate Lucy’s experiences in Narnia, before selling his siblings for a box of crack-laced Turkish delight. Way to go, Ed. Yet by “The Voyage of the Dawn Treader,” Edmund has evolved the strength of character to tell Eustace calmly, “You were only an ass, but I was a traitor.” Stumbling heroes linger longer.

Have you discovered any good new books for young people through your own two children?

Lots, yes. In the 1970s and 1980s there was so little decent fiction for young people, but we’re now in a golden age that shows no sign of fading. Philip Pullman, J. K. Rowling, Lemony Snicket are only three of the best known among a good number of equals. Michael Morpurgo is a great evoker of place and emotion, and a cool stylist. Neil Gaiman’s “Coraline” and “The Graveyard Book” are both gorgeous pieces of work which will outlive most of us, I expect.

You have written that you see your stammering as “an informant about language.” In what ways has it informed your approach to reading, and to writing?

Reading, maybe not a lot, other than to nudge me towards books and away from people, which maybe is a lot, after all. As a future writer, however, my stammer was an effective if merciless boot-camp instructor. It (or “He” as I imagined it) trained me to amass a vocabulary flexible and muscular enough to avoid words beginning with stammer-consonants, and do so on the hoof, before the other person caught on. My stammer also taught me about register — it was no good substituting “autodidact” for “I taught myself” because in a bog-standard state school in 1980s Britain using a word like “autodidact” got you convicted of talking posh, an offense punishable by being hung from iron railings by your underpants. What I didn’t know at the time was how linguistic register helps a novelist flesh out character and lends authenticity to dialogue or narrated thought. So while I wouldn’t say that stammering drove me to become a writer — this impulse comes from elsewhere — it did influence the type of writer I have become. What feels like a curse when you’re younger can prove to be a long-term ally.

If you could match three writers, dead or alive, with three topics of your choice, who would you have write about what?

I’ve puzzled for days over this, but drawn a blank. In order to concoct a pleasing combo — Mark Twain on the Tea Party, for example — you must already imagine what the author would write — an all-you-can-eat of gourmet ridicule — so there’s no element of surprise. There’s also a “changing the eye of the beholder” problem: sending an age-of-sail novelist into space, for example, would involve so much technical bringing-up-to-speed that I’m not sure whether Conrad, say, would still be writing like Conrad by the time he was climbing into his spacesuit. My only other idea is more vengeful than illuminating: to gather up a party of the most vociferous climate change deniers and send them 100 years into the future so they have to share the fates of their own great-grandchildren. But even then, I suspect, they would find reasons why it was someone else’s fault.