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What is your idea of perfect happiness?
Question
When were you happiest?
Time & hindsight
Question
How would you like to die?
Death & what remains
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.
Perfection is a second-rate idea. I would guess, however, that perfected happiness would be joy, the most intricate and mercurial of all sensations. The moment one recognizes joy, it flees. I’m not sure where Proust is going with this line of questioning, and I don’t want to be evasive, so I will say my idea of perfect happiness is the end of economics; we grow like flowers and fly like birds; the lion lays down with the lamb—a ridiculous idea.
The Proust Questionnaire, Vanity Fair, 1 January 2014 source ↗
Others on this question
View all 161 →Watching my girls laugh together. It is more short-lived than I’d like, but it does happen!
Elmore Leonard
Novelist and screenwriter
Being with my best friend, who’s a girl.
Eating ice cream in the cinema, watching the trailers, with the main film about to start.
More from T Bone Burnett
View profile →My happiest moment was being in the room when my daughter was born, and seeing her draw her first breath and turn from what looked like gray clay into the deepest, most vibrant, most psychedelic crimson. It was an unforgettable, unimaginable explosion of energy and potential—of promise and pure love.
I would like to die in good health, at an old age, in a house on a mountain that looks out over the ocean, dreaming about everyone and everything I have had the impossible good fortune to have loved. Maybe Ralph Stanley is singing “Angel Band.”
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Also answered this
Jane Birkin, Audra McDonald, John Mellencamp, Hans Zimmer, Bonnie Raitt, Patti Smith
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Explore further
- All identity & self questions
- The The Proust Questionnaire questionnaire — 5 questions from the same format
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