Whenever I finish good work.
The Q&A, The Guardian, 5 October 2024 source ↗
The question
What period or moment in your life brought you the most joy?Originally asked
The Guardian, to a different person each week, The Q&A
Asked in 52 of the 131 consecutive instalments of The Guardian's The Q&A harvested on 2026-08-29.
You answer as yourself. Nobody on FLAPSS answers as anybody else.
Others on this question
View all 577 →
Rosanna Arquette
American actress
I am trying to find a little happiness at least once a day, so this morning.
Alan Cumming
Scottish actor, producer, director, writer and presenter
A couple of summers ago, walking through a forest illuminated by fireflies, with my man and our dogs.
Johanna Konta
British tennis player
When I was a young girl in Sydney, I used to go running with my dad. I would wake him up at the crack of dawn and we had this route to the top of a golf course – we’d usually make it there for sunrise.
Camille Paglia
American feminist academic and critic
Snorkelling for an hour with a comically disciplined and curiously attentive squadron of six, fat Caribbean reef squid off Mexico.
More from Marina Abramović
View profile →Long hair, big nose, large ass.
To have more time.
Spend your time on something meaningful. Not on parties, and not on taking it easy. That’s not good enough. […] When you’re young, you think: Let’s party, do drugs, drink, waste it all, right? But as you get older, you look at what you’ve accomplished. And when you get old, you’ve run out of time. You have to ask yourself: Why am I here? Can I contribute anything to humanity, to society, my work?
Recorded
University Post, University of Copenhagen public talk, University Post (uniavisen.dk), University of Copenhagen
source ↗
My difficulty to forgive.
Pretending I’m happy when I’m not.
Last year when I had a pulmonary embolism – it was a very scary time.
More on time & hindsight
- What lesson has mattered most in your life? 138 answers
- What counsel would you give your twenty-year-old self — and what should they ignore? 78 answers
- What worries you about getting older? 61 answers
- What counsel has proved most valuable to you? 28 answers
- If you could put a message on a giant billboard, what would it say and why? 25 answers
- What line from a parent, teacher, or mentor do you still repeat to yourself? 23 answers
Also answered this
Joseph Fiennes, Tony Christie, Timothy Hutton, Gloria Estefan, Helen Mirren, Ian Wright
Search the directory for somebody in particular.
Explore further
- All time & hindsight questions
- The The Q&A questionnaire — 25 questions from the same format
- Explore the archive — by field, age, era, and subject