I become very anxious if I think I’ve hurt someone.
What is your greatest fear?
Question
What happens when we die?
Death & what remains
Question
If you could edit your past, what would you change?
Failure & regret
Question
What single thing would improve the quality of your life?
Daily life
Question
What keeps you awake at night?
Daily life
Question
How close have you come to death?
Death & what remains
Question
What most recently made you cry?
Identity & self
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.
Fear is for frightened people. I’m not one of those.
The Q&A, The Guardian, 1 March 2025 source ↗
Others on this question
View all 256 →That I take this questionnaire too seriously and reveal my crimes and misdemeanors, or I treat this questionnaire too flippantly and bring shame to the House of Proust.
Harlan Coben
American author
I don’t even voice them. Perhaps the books are my outlet here.
Warren Buffett
Chairman and chief executive of Berkshire Hathaway, 1970–2025
And now, you've got nine countries, including, you know, a guy in North Korea. I mean, and there will be, something will happen. And we worried enormously about it when there were two. And we had perfectly, we had really pretty sane leaders in Kennedy and Khrushchev. You know, I mean, you were not dealing with unstable people or anything like that.
Recorded
Becky Quick, CNBC “Squawk Box”, recorded in Omaha; CNBC's own transcript of its own broadcast, 31 March 2026
source ↗
More from Justin Hawkins
View profile →Massive DMT release, your perception of time dilates, you realise you can fly, then it all goes black, and you start again, only this time … you’re a slug.
Absolutely nothing.
OCD medication.
Intrusive thoughts and caffeine.
A flight from Paraguay to South Africa that went badly wrong. The plane nearly fell out of the sky and the oxygen masks dropped. People were screaming but the pilot saved the day, and then apparently never flew again.
I cried watching the movie Coco with my daughter.
More on identity & self
- Which trait do you most dislike in yourself? 243 answers
- What did you want to be when you were growing up? 195 answers
- What most recently made you cry? 193 answers
- What is your idea of perfect happiness? 158 answers
- How would you describe yourself in three words? 111 answers
- What are you most proud of? 103 answers
Also answered this
David Hasselhoff, Jerry Lewis, Hans Zimmer, Danielle Steel, Gloria Steinem, Sally Field
Search the directory for somebody in particular.
Explore further
- All identity & self questions
- The The Proust Questionnaire questionnaire — 5 questions from the same format
- Explore the archive — by field, age, era, and subject