What is your greatest fear?

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.

Recorded Bill Maher said elsewhere, not written here
Waking up after a sleepover at John Waters’s house and finding my sleeping bag isn’t zipped up the same way as when I passed out. Or “President Palin.”

Vanity Fair, The Proust Questionnaire, Vanity Fair, May 2010 source ↗

Others on this question

View all 256 →
Tom Lubbock Art critic
I think that loss of speech, and of understanding of speech, and of understanding of writing, and of coherent writing – these losses will amount to the loss of my mind. I know what this feels like and it has no insides, no internal echo. Mind means talking to oneself. There wouldn't be any secret mind surviving in me.
Recorded The Observer, from the journals he kept between 2008 and 2010, 7 November 2010 source ↗
Edward Enninful Ghanaian-born English editor and stylist
When I get to the restaurant and don’t see any hot sauce on the table.
Recorded The Guardian, The Q&A, The Guardian, 24 December 2022 source ↗
Christiane Nüsslein-Volhard Developmental biologist; Nobel laureate in Physiology or Medicine, 1995
I don’t think it’s misused yet, people are afraid of it might be misused but on the other hand, there is also value in finding out about the relation between several particular predispositions. You might be more careful if you are told that your genetic background is such that you shouldn’t eat fat in large amounts or so, it does help you change your life a little bit and so it’s not so bad, but it’s hard to find out which genetic background is causing these things.
Recorded Marika Griehsel, Interview at the 53rd Lindau Nobel Laureate Meeting, 30 June–4 July 2003, Nobel Prize Outreach, 1 July 2003 source ↗

More from Bill Maher

View profile →

More on identity & self

Also answered this

Ina Garten, Cybill Shepherd, Ardal O'Hanlon, Joan Rivers, Lena Dunham, Trevor Noah

Search the directory for somebody in particular.

Explore further

Report this answer