The question
What do you fear most?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 ↗
Lack of purpose.
To be forgotten too is to die a little. It is to lose some of the links that anchor us to the rest of humanity.
The fact that, until recently, “the end of the world” would have seemed pretentious and evasive, and now seems like the only possible answer.
The concept of eternity.
In 1993, making love on the beach of a deserted island in the Bahamas.
First loved, then laid, then paid.
Do the secret thing you know you were born to do.
“Try this, you’ll love it.”
A painting by Renoir, paid for by demanding a huge fee for a screenwriting deal with a producer I didn’t want to work for. The movie was never made.
More than I can, sadly. I led the softest of lives in the softest of times, and my daughter will face sterner challenges.
Stephen Fry, Sofia Coppola, Patrick Stewart, Sally Mann, Cory Taylor, Helena Bonham Carter
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