Originally asked
The Guardian, to a different person each week, The Q&A
The Guardian's The Q&A has retained this Proust-derived prompt from at least 2007 through 2026, and ABC independently put it to the Obamas in 2011.
You answer as yourself. Nobody on FLAPSS answers as anybody else.
Vanity Fair, The Proust Questionnaire, Vanity Fair, September 2009 source ↗
I’m rabidly indiscreet. If you tell me an embarrassing story, it will probably end up in one of my scripts or standup routines.
Oversharing. I long to be intimately connected to people and sometimes, among strangers, I don’t read the room.
I love to break rules.
Punctuality (outside of work, of course).
To be wildly, desperately, carelessly, nakedly in love, of course. Crazy, obsessive love: brooding, baying at the moon, writing daily missives to the adored. Who wouldn’t want this? Even though the crash is painful.
My president, a heroic figure—also good- humored, pretty smart, elegant; and if the rest of the world thinks he typifies America, I don’t mind at all.
That this is all there is, and there is no more.
The night my daughter was born, New York, December 29, 1997. After she emerged and I held her in the palm of my hand, I walked around Manhattan in a stupor of happiness.
Alain de Botton, Kiell Smith-Bynoe, Guy Pearce, Toni Collette, Caroline Lucas, Richard Schiff
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