The question
What is your greatest fear?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.
Not being loved.
The Q&A, The Guardian, 14 March 2026 source ↗
To be eaten by a shark.
I want to be a voice for the kid. I mean, it sounds quite contrived, but I want to make music that I would have wanted to hear when I was 14.
Getting to the end and thinking that I haven’t laughed enough.
Having no purpose.
Impatient, ambitious and happy.
I’ve a deplorable tendency to become entrenched in my own prejudices: If I dislike an artist, an art form, or an idea (jazz, ballet, certain kinds of fiction) it is extremely difficult to get me to change my mind, and all evidence presented to the contrary will be discarded and very likely mocked. Of course, nobody suffers but me.
Like it’s worth being alive.
I am so obdurate I do not change my mind.
I often hate-read the Daily Mail. It’s the worst of media and the worst of mankind distilled into one publication and in some ways it feels a moral duty to be familiar with it. Too often we all bolt ourselves into an echo chamber, which I think lacks courage, and can lead to a kind of intellectual conceitedness.
Every single morning the sun comes up and you get to try again.
Michael Cunningham, Cyndi Lauper, Takashi Murakami, Alison Steadman, John Lewis, J.K. Rowling
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