The question
What lesson has mattered most in your life?Originally asked
The Guardian, to a different person each week, The Q&A
Verbatim recurring item in The Guardian Q&A; two fully readable publisher-hosted respondent pages establish institutional recurrence.
You answer as yourself. Nobody on FLAPSS answers as anybody else.
Offer kindness always.
The Q&A, The Guardian, 29 March 2025 source ↗
Life’s too short to take offence.
To be inquisitive.
Live in the moment. Enjoy life because time cruelly speeds up as you get older and becomes scarily finite.
Not really. I thought that getting the Nobel Prize was a big interruption in my career, I thought and it was very distracting. It takes a lot of time you know, it just takes time to be honoured, you have to travel and you have to give speeches of things you have, oh it’s so often that you get bored to tears when you hear your own voice. And it’s really taking a lot of your time and there’s no way that during this time you can start something new, I mean you just profit from what you’ve done and there is no time to develop new ideas.
I was the PE technician at my old secondary school, so I had to pump up all the balls, wash all the kits and get the form notes in before morning registration every day.
Having music for limbs.
Oh when was the last time I didn’t?! I’m a crier. I cry. All the time.
A good listener.
I am genuinely buzzed about it! I think we just keep getting better, smarter, wiser, truer, happier.
Sounds cliched, but I always wanted to be an actor.
Maya Jama, Rita Wilson, Dervla Kirwan, Pauline McLynn, Shinya Yamanaka, Andrew Ridgeley
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