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 ↗
A world destroyed by science-denying mediocrity.
Naming my greatest fear, because then I’ll have to admit it, won’t I?
People laughing at me, which is terrible for someone who makes a living out of making people laugh.
Losing my family in some way.
Nothing. If I’m worried or upset or tormented, I go to sleep quickly and easily, to find welcome oblivion.
First loved, then laid, then paid.
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.
Always saying yes to people. For example, I’m doing this.
In 1993, making love on the beach of a deserted island in the Bahamas.
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.
Whoopi Goldberg, Harlan Coben, Bryn Terfel, Omid Djalili, Diahann Carroll, James Norton
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