The fact that I smoke.
What scares you about getting older?
Question
What is the worst job you have done?
Craft & work
Question
Which book are you ashamed not to have read?
Taste & recommendation
Question
Which moment embarrassed you most?
Failure & regret
Question
What single thing would improve the quality of your life?
Daily life
Question
What has been your biggest disappointment?
Failure & regret
Question
What most recently made you cry?
Identity & self
Originally asked
The Guardian, to a different person each week, The Q&A
A newer fixed question in The Guardian's rotating Q&A pool.
You answer as yourself. Nobody on FLAPSS answers as anybody else.
Losing the people that I love.
The Q&A, The Guardian, 19 April 2025 source ↗
Others on this question
View all 61 →Not being flexible enough to dance freely.
Winston Churchill
Prime Minister of the United Kingdom, 1940–1945 and 1951–1955; Member of Parliament 1900–1964
One by one the more vigorous sports and exacting games fall away. Exceptional exertions are purchased only by a more pronounced and more prolonged fatigue. Muscles may relax, and feet and hands slow down; the nerve of youth and manhood may become less trusty. But painting is a friend who makes no undue demands, excites to no exhausting pursuits, keeps faithful pace even with feeble steps, and holds her canvas as a screen between us and the envious eyes of Time or the surly advance of Decrepitude. Happy are the painters, for they shall not be lonely.
Recorded
Essay first published in the Strand Magazine in 1921–22 and collected in Amid These Storms, 1932, Winston S. Churchill, Painting as a Pastime, Project Gutenberg Canada, 1932
source ↗
Neil Gaiman
Author of fiction, comics and screenplays
Mostly the pain. I don’t want to be trapped in a body that hurts.
More from Gregory Porter
View profile →When I worked at a dog food company shovelling the exterminated rats.
Because it’s in one of my songs, War and Peace.
Dancing on stage with an open fly.
More time with my boys.
The Covid years. My life is diminished since then. I lost my brother. My children lost some social expression, and we are still recovering from that.
Telling a story to my son about my brother.
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