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.

Recorded Melissa Etheridge said elsewhere, not written here
To let fear overcome my life. We’re not gonna let that happen because love is always greater than fear.

Vanity Fair, The Proust Questionnaire, Vanity Fair, August 2023 source ↗

Others on this question

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Christiane Nüsslein-Volhard Developmental biologist; Nobel laureate in Physiology or Medicine, 1995
I don’t think it’s misused yet, people are afraid of it might be misused but on the other hand, there is also value in finding out about the relation between several particular predispositions. You might be more careful if you are told that your genetic background is such that you shouldn’t eat fat in large amounts or so, it does help you change your life a little bit and so it’s not so bad, but it’s hard to find out which genetic background is causing these things.
Recorded Marika Griehsel, Interview at the 53rd Lindau Nobel Laureate Meeting, 30 June–4 July 2003, Nobel Prize Outreach, 1 July 2003 source ↗
It was reading out loud, but no longer. (I am dyslexic.) I was encouraged by my husband to do a speech for the Royal National Institute of Blind People, which helped me gain my confidence, and the fear disappeared.
Recorded The Q&A, The Guardian, 27 September 2025 source ↗
I fear the arrogance we are all at risk of, the pride that pushes us to put “I” in place of “God”. More prosaically, I fear physical pain because it risks stripping us of our dignity.
Recorded The Q&A, The Guardian, 2 November 2024 source ↗

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