Violent death. Death generally.
Vanity Fair, The Proust Questionnaire, Vanity Fair, November 2016 source ↗
The question
What do you fear most?Originally asked
Vanity Fair, to its interview subject, The Proust Questionnaire
The exact prompt is fixed in Vanity Fair's Proust Questionnaire and independently sustained in The Guardian's The Q&A over multiple decades.
You answer as yourself. Nobody on FLAPSS answers as anybody else.
Others on this question
View all 256 →To lose the ability to do my work.
Failure. I hate losing, particularly at football and politics. I play five-a-side every week – middle of midfield, barking orders. Some people say it’s the taking part that counts. I am not in that camp. It’s the winning that counts.
Having no way of earning money.
Bruno Tonioli
Italian choreographer
Sheer drops, like a precipice.
More from Zadie Smith
View profile →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.
Reading quietly, in high grass, among loved ones (who are also quietly reading). Followed by a boozy lunch.
Protect the time and space in which you write. Keep everybody away from it, even the people who are most important to you.
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.
Oblivious to the event or on the brink of a genuine religious conversion.
Narcissism, solipsism.
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