That we will be remembered as a people who locked our fellow citizens in cages and who believe that some people are rich and some people are poor because “it’s their nature” and that racism and poverty are inevitable parts of the order of things; that M.L.K. and Bobby Kennedy died in vain; and that no one any longer believes what M.L.K. said in his Nobel Prize address in Oslo: “There is nothing new about poverty. What is new, however, is that we have the resources to get rid of it.”
What is your greatest fear?
Question
What is the trait you most deplore in others?
Values & belief
Question
What is your idea of perfect happiness?
Identity & self
Question
Which trait do you most dislike in yourself?
Identity & self
Question
When were you happiest?
Time & hindsight
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.
Climate change, duh.
Vanity Fair, The Proust Questionnaire, Vanity Fair, October 2024 source ↗
Others on this question
View all 256 →
Daryl McCormack
Irish actor
Not actualising my full potential.
Losing my memory.
Losing one of my children, as there is no greater loss.
More from John Lithgow
View profile →Three versions of the same trait: deceit, hypocrisy, and manipulativeness.
Creating something and feeling proud of it.
Conflict aversion.
Probably the curtain call of my final performance when I played King Lear.
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? 195 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? 111 answers
- What are you most proud of? 103 answers
Also answered this
John Grisham, Hamza Yassin, DJ Khaled, Bryn Terfel, James Taylor, Jim Kerr
Search the directory for somebody in particular.
Explore further
- All identity & self questions
- The The Proust Questionnaire questionnaire — 5 questions from the same format
- Explore the archive — by field, age, era, and subject