I don’t want to be lost and burn in hell.
What is your greatest fear?
Question
What is the most important lesson life has taught you?
Time & hindsight
Question
What keeps you awake at night?
Daily life
Question
When were you happiest?
Time & hindsight
Question
Which moment embarrassed you most?
Failure & regret
Question
What would you like to leave your children?
Death & what remains
Question
Which living person do you most admire, and why?
Values & belief
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.
I’m from Birmingham. I’m not afraid of things. Things are afraid of me.
The Q&A, The Guardian, 7 June 2025 source ↗
Others on this question
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Roger Ebert
Film critic
Many readers have informed me that it is a tragic and dreary business to go into death without faith. I don’t feel that way. “Faith” is neutral. All depends on what is believed in. I have no desire to live forever. The concept frightens me. I am 69, have had cancer, will die sooner than most of those reading this. That is in the nature of things.
To lose the ability to do my work.
Losing family, friends, and loved ones.
More from Lee Child
View profile →Do the secret thing you know you were born to do.
Nothing. If I’m worried or upset or tormented, I go to sleep quickly and easily, to find welcome oblivion.
In 1993, making love on the beach of a deserted island in the Bahamas.
Appearing on US breakfast radio. I heard the DJ say that after the news we would hear from the author Lincoln Child. I had to choose between making a guy with a mixed-up PR release look like an idiot or pretending to be Lincoln. I pretended.
More than I can, sadly. I led the softest of lives in the softest of times, and my daughter will face sterner challenges.
The exact median middle-aged black woman in the US. If hard work guaranteed success, she’d be the most successful person on the planet. But she isn’t, yet she keeps on going.
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- All identity & self questions
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