Being found out.
What is your greatest fear?
Question
What do you value most in your friends?
Relationships
Question
What is your idea of perfect happiness?
Identity & self
Question
Which living person do you most admire, and why?
Values & belief
Question
Which trait do you most dislike in yourself?
Identity & self
Question
What would you like to be remembered for?
Death & what remains
Question
What is the trait you most deplore in others?
Values & belief
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.
Food in a sink drain.
Vanity Fair, The Proust Questionnaire, Vanity Fair, June 2025 source ↗
Others on this question
View all 256 →
Joan Rivers
Comedian
Being poor—or, worse, having Kelsey Grammer fight with Teddy Kennedy over who is to drive me home.
To be stuck in the past.
Jane Asher
English actress and author
I’ve always been frightened of the dark. I sometimes wonder whether it stems from being away filming from the age of five. I can remember being devastatingly homesick and having a little nightlight I used to look at to reassure myself things were all right.
More from Kevin Bacon
View profile →They want nothing but friendship.
A family dinner. Candlelight. Lots of laughs.
My wife – for her intelligence, talent, ability to survive this business and be such a fantastic mother to our two kids. (Of course, I have to say that, because she’s sitting right here.)
I can’t stand the way my voice will crack if I’m making a speech. I hate public speaking and the emotion it dredges up.
As someone who did what he could with what he had.
Lying. Let’s not call it “untruthful.” Or “factually inaccurate.” I don’t even call it bullshit, because I like bulls. And bulls need to shit. So you can’t hold that against them. Let’s call it what it is: lying.
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? 196 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? 112 answers
- What are you most proud of? 104 answers
Also answered this
Jim Kerr, Fiona Allen, David Chang, Tina Turner, Norman Lear, Rebecca Lucy Taylor
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