Showing off onstage, with everyone laughing and applauding.
Vanity Fair, The Proust Questionnaire, Vanity Fair, 8 January 2019 source ↗
The question
What kind of death would you consider a good one?Originally asked
Vanity Fair, to its interview subject, The Proust Questionnaire
A fixed final question in Vanity Fair's Proust Questionnaire, repeated verbatim across respondent pages.
You answer as yourself. Nobody on FLAPSS answers as anybody else.
Others on this question
View all 43 →
Terry Pratchett
Novelist
I remember what George said and vowed that rather than let Alzheimer's take me, I would take it. I would live my life as ever to the full and die, before the disease mounted its last attack, in my own home, in a chair on the lawn, with a brandy in my hand to wash down whatever modern version of the "Brompton cocktail" some helpful medic could supply. And with Thomas Tallis on my iPod, I would shake hands with Death.
Recorded
Edited extract from the Richard Dimbleby Lecture, Shaking Hands With Death, Royal College of Physicians, broadcast on BBC1 on 1 February 2010, The Guardian, 2 February 2010
source ↗
Lily Tomlin
Comedian and actor
In my sleep, “dreaming android dreams of electric sheep.”
Oliver Sacks
Neurologist and writer
It was this celestial splendor that suddenly made me realize how little time, how little life, I had left. My sense of the heavens’ beauty, of eternity, was inseparably mixed for me with a sense of transience — and death. ... I told my friends Kate and Allen, “I would like to see such a sky again when I am dying.” “We’ll wheel you outside,” they said.
Dolly Parton
American singer-songwriter, actress and businesswoman
Singing onstage—and everyone walking around me saying, “Look how happy she looks.”
More from Hans Zimmer
View profile →A world destroyed by science-denying mediocrity.
Playing around in my studio by myself, discovering the possibility of new ideas.
To place faith over facts.
They can take the piss out of me and it still feels like wisdom and loyalty.
A little more self-confidence wouldn’t hurt.
Sir David Attenborough, John Prendergast.
More on death & what remains
- How would you want people to remember you? 213 answers
- How close have you come to dying? 209 answers
- What song would you want played at your funeral? 178 answers
- If you had only one day left, how would you spend it — and what would you deliberately avoid? 54 answers
- What do you believe happens when we die? 50 answers
- What would you most want to leave your children? 44 answers
Also answered this
Dolly Parton, T Bone Burnett, Rita Moreno, John Mellencamp, Bonnie Raitt, Audra McDonald
Search the directory for somebody in particular.
Explore further
- All death & what remains questions
- The The Proust Questionnaire questionnaire — 5 questions from the same format
- Explore the archive — by field, age, era, and subject