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Going back to addiction.
The Guardian, The Q&A, The Guardian, 14 January 2023 source ↗
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.
Others on this question
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Warren Buffett
Chairman and chief executive of Berkshire Hathaway, 1970–2025
And now, you've got nine countries, including, you know, a guy in North Korea. I mean, and there will be, something will happen. And we worried enormously about it when there were two. And we had perfectly, we had really pretty sane leaders in Kennedy and Khrushchev. You know, I mean, you were not dealing with unstable people or anything like that.
Recorded
Becky Quick, CNBC “Squawk Box”, recorded in Omaha; CNBC's own transcript of its own broadcast, 31 March 2026
source ↗
Walking into a room filled with friends and family singing “Happy Birthday” to me and I am completely naked.
Dying: I’m too iconic to go.
Losing my memory.
More from Paul Merson
View profile →Walsall fans. I wanted to be a good manager but I was really bad with drink and gambling at the time. I should have done better.
When you jump out of addiction and look back, things like drink-driving and sitting in crack houses are not good.
On holiday in Orlando with my wife, Kate, and kids just before lockdown. I wasn’t drinking or gambling. I was so happy, so at peace with myself – I’d been searching for that for many a year.
That materialistic things will not make you happy.
For me, love is working through things when it’s not going well.
Nothing, because it’s up to me how I feel. I’ve been a millionaire three times and I still wanted to kill myself.
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