Henry Winkler: What does happiness look like for you when life is going well?

The question

What does happiness look like for you when life is going well?

Originally asked

Vanity Fair, to its interview subject, The Proust Questionnaire

Verbatim recurring item in Vanity Fair's Proust Questionnaire; two publisher-hosted respondent pages establish institutional recurrence.

You answer as yourself. Nobody on FLAPSS answers as anybody else.

Henry Winkler

Recorded said elsewhere, not written here

The entire family being healthy, being on the set of Barry, and a rainbow trout on my line.

The Proust Questionnaire, Vanity Fair, 13 August 2018 source ↗

Others on this question

View all 158 →

Joyce Carol Oates Novelist, short story writer and essayist

“Perfect happiness!”—waking in the morning to a clear & benevolent-seeming sky, a view from a window of a beautiful (if overgrown) garden, a cat purring. The excitement of rewriting the previous day’s work, & continuing on from that point energized & hopeful. For a writer, “happiness” isn’t likely to ever be “perfect”—but it is likely to be bound up with the work-in-progress. First drafts tend to be frustrating, exhausting—subsequent drafts sometimes move swiftly, even miraculously. For most adults, “Perfect is the enemy of good”—we learn to appreciate whatever measure of happiness we have, however modest.

Recorded The Proust Questionnaire, Vanity Fair, 28 November 2018 source ↗

Andrea Martin

Listening to my sons play a piano-and-sax duet.

Recorded The Proust Questionnaire, Vanity Fair, 24 April 2017 source ↗

Helena Bonham Carter Actor

In my bed, a hot-water bottle on my tummy, the windows are open, reading a book that I’m already into, chocolate at hand, all with the knowledge that everyone I love and know is happy.

Recorded The Proust Questionnaire, Vanity Fair, 28 April 2020 source ↗

Betty White