On a beach, watching my girls do cartwheels, with a Goombay Smash with a floater on top.
When were you happiest?
Question
What scares you about getting older?
Time & hindsight
Question
What is your idea of perfect happiness?
Identity & self
Question
What is your worst intellectual habit?
Craft & work
Question
How would you describe yourself in three words?
Identity & self
Question
What did you want to be when you were growing up?
Identity & self
Question
How do you balance creative work with other responsibilities?
Daily life
Originally asked
The Guardian, to a different person each week, The Q&A
Asked in 52 of the 131 consecutive instalments of The Guardian's The Q&A harvested on 2026-08-29.
You answer as yourself. Nobody on FLAPSS answers as anybody else.
Young people don’t know that they’re young. We were happy because we felt we were doing something positive and our poems were reaching people in spite of all the censorship and police issues.
Svetlana Gutkina, Culture.pl, 2019 source ↗
Others on this question
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Abigail Breslin
American actress
Christmas 2007 – I got hair straighteners.
Riz Ahmed
British actor and rapper
Preparing for Sound Of Metal. Feeling challenged and overwhelmed and lost in something is very fulfilling.
In the 18-yard box.
More from Adam Zagajewski
View profile →The good part of aging is that you read more and more. You discover poets you never heard of when you were younger.
Happiness springs from having found a form of expression that also earns recognition.
But it seems to me that I’m somebody who is deeply skeptical and trying to combat this skepticism. So my writing is probably situated somewhere between the poles of skepticism and ecstasy, with my dream being to have more ecstatic poems.
I never know who I am.
Well, in a certain sense, the decision that I was the one who was going to be writing was already formed when I was 12 years old when I was spending those winter evenings reading Verne and other authors; I thought then that books were the best thing in the world. That this was something I wanted to do.
Generally, my hours are during the first part of the day; hardly ever in the evening. The hours nearer noon, the zenith of the day, are good for working.
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Barbara Taylor Bradford, Richard Coles, Daniel Clowes, Adrian Edmondson, Cressida Cowell, Shirley MacLaine
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