Learning lines.
What scares you about getting older?
Question
When was the last time you changed your mind about something?
Change of mind
Question
How do you know when a piece of work is finished?
Craft & work
Question
What are bad recommendations you hear in your profession or area of expertise?
Craft & work
Question
What is your worst intellectual habit?
Craft & work
Question
What are you unwilling to optimise?
Values & belief
Question
What does love feel like?
Relationships
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.
It brings the freedom of having seen a lot of things and survived them.
Kate Kellaway, Interview, The Guardian, 9 May 2020 source ↗
Others on this question
View all 68 →
Neil Gaiman
Author of fiction, comics and screenplays
Mostly the pain. I don’t want to be trapped in a body that hurts.
So far, getting older has made almost everything better.
Aaron Ciechanover
Biologist and physician; Nobel laureate in chemistry for the discovery of ubiquitin-mediated protein degradation
You have to die of something. Let’s say we would be able to cure cancer, or Alzheimer, or cardiovascular diseases. And then what? Should we be young forever or healthy forever?
More from Richard Ford
View profile →Based on how the scene felt I completely switched the dynamics.
I want to be able to do what I have always done which is to say, "I could do this no better. I could not make this better."
These mandarin-precious-princess-and-the-pea notions about a writer’s “special place” just didn’t match my life.
My half measures are really not good measures.
I’m just practical. Life comes first for me; art second. Sometimes art comes even later than second.
I used to tell Kristina, “I choose to be married to you every day.”
More on time & hindsight
- When were you happiest? 585 answers
- What is the most important lesson life has taught you? 147 answers
- What advice would you give your twenty-year-old self, and what should they ignore? 90 answers
- What is the best advice you have ever received? 35 answers
- What is something you were told by a parent, teacher, or mentor that you still repeat to yourself? 26 answers
- If you could have a gigantic billboard anywhere, what would it say and why? 25 answers
Also answered this
Kurt Vonnegut, Margaret Atwood, Terry Pratchett, Adam Zagajewski, Neil Gaiman, Maurice Sendak
Search the directory for somebody in particular.
Explore further
- All time & hindsight questions
- The The Q&A questionnaire — 25 questions from the same format
- Explore the archive — by field, age, era, and subject