Being with my best friend, who’s a girl.
The Proust Questionnaire, Vanity Fair, 1 December 2012 source ↗
The question
What does happiness look like for you when life is going well?Originally asked
Vanity Fair, to its interview subject, The Proust Questionnaire
Verbatim recurring item in Vanity Fair's Proust Questionnaire; two publisher-hosted respondent pages establish institutional recurrence.
You answer as yourself. Nobody on FLAPSS answers as anybody else.
Others on this question
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Joyce Carol Oates
Novelist, short story writer and essayist
“Perfect happiness!”—waking in the morning to a clear & benevolent-seeming sky, a view from a window of a beautiful (if overgrown) garden, a cat purring. The excitement of rewriting the previous day’s work, & continuing on from that point energized & hopeful. For a writer, “happiness” isn’t likely to ever be “perfect”—but it is likely to be bound up with the work-in-progress. First drafts tend to be frustrating, exhausting—subsequent drafts sometimes move swiftly, even miraculously. For most adults, “Perfect is the enemy of good”—we learn to appreciate whatever measure of happiness we have, however modest.
Floating on my back in the ocean.
Warren Buffett
Chairman and chief executive of Berkshire Hathaway, 1970–2025
The reaction of my family and me to our extraordinary good fortune is not guilt, but rather gratitude. Were we to use more than 1% of my claim checks on ourselves, neither our happiness nor our well-being would be enhanced. In contrast, that remaining 99% can have a huge effect on the health and welfare of others.
Recorded
His own pledge letter, written on joining the Giving Pledge in 2010, The Giving Pledge, 2010
source ↗
To survive from an impossible condition.
More from Elmore Leonard
View profile →That they get it.
Guys who use the word “snot.”
Convince myself that walking two miles a day isn’t boring.
Peyton Manning.
My most important rule is one that sums up the 10: if it sounds like writing, I rewrite it.
Does it make a difference? You’re dead.
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Also answered this
Stephen Fry, Eugene Levy, Judy Blume, Patti Smith, Kazuo Ishiguro, Joyce Carol Oates
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