The question
What do you fear most?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.
Insanity. I am on a recovery programme – clean from drugs and drink for many years – and if I stopped doing all that stuff I’d go crazy pretty quick and pick up drugs again, because I was a real fucking addict.
The Guardian, The Q&A, The Guardian, 9 August 2025 source ↗
When I get to the restaurant and don’t see any hot sauce on the table.
Dying just a millisecond before I was about to say something I really wanted the people I love to hear.
Dying too young, and spiders.
Not fulfilling my potential.
Gerry Adams, because he’s got incredible integrity and vision, and he’s had to put up with so much flak.
My dad said, “You’re going nowhere.” I was seven or eight.
Shakespeare said, “There is nothing either good or bad, but thinking makes it so” – I think that’s true.
I worked in the stores of Edgware hospital when I was about 17, and it was grey and depressing.
My brother Pete passing on in 2005.
On stage – the Old Vic in 1981 and Glastonbury last year.
Bruce Dickinson, Johnny Flynn, Patti Smith, Jason Manford, Rita Wilson, Dolly Parton
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