Oblivious to the event or on the brink of a genuine religious conversion.
Vanity Fair, The Proust Questionnaire, Vanity Fair, 4 November 2016 source ↗
The question
What kind of death would you consider a good one?Originally asked
Vanity Fair, to its interview subject, The Proust Questionnaire
A fixed final question in Vanity Fair's Proust Questionnaire, repeated verbatim across respondent pages.
You answer as yourself. Nobody on FLAPSS answers as anybody else.
Others on this question
View all 43 →
Lily Tomlin
Comedian and actor
In my sleep, “dreaming android dreams of electric sheep.”
Pedro Almodóvar
Film director
Like John Huston, after shooting The Dead.
Diane Keaton
Actor and director
Like? I have no soft spot, fondness, admiration, respect, attraction, or esteem for death. I am not taken with it or infatuated by it. I carry no torch, have no crush, take no shine to the word or action of death. I don’t have the hots for it, and I don’t dig it, either.
John Mellencamp
Singer and songwriter
I need a long and lingering death to make sure that I have time to have a deathbed conversion.
More from Zadie Smith
View profile →I feel almost certain I don't know them. It would be one of these types who dedicate their lives to the welfare of others, whereas the people I tend to know are people making stories out of the dramas of themselves.
Violent death. Death generally.
Protect the time and space in which you write. Keep everybody away from it, even the people who are most important to you.
Reading quietly, in high grass, among loved ones (who are also quietly reading). Followed by a boozy lunch.
Narcissism, solipsism.
Don’t romanticise your “vocation”. You can either write good sentences or you can’t. There is no “writer’s lifestyle”. All that matters is what you leave on the page.
More on death & what remains
- How would you want people to remember you? 213 answers
- How close have you come to dying? 209 answers
- What song would you want played at your funeral? 178 answers
- If you had only one day left, how would you spend it — and what would you deliberately avoid? 54 answers
- What do you believe happens when we die? 50 answers
- What would you most want to leave your children? 44 answers
Also answered this
George Saunders, Terry Pratchett, Danielle Steel, Karl Ove Knausgård, Elmore Leonard, Stephen Fry
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