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 can’t say it.
The Q&A, The Guardian, 25 July 2026 source ↗
Being murdered – I listen to too many true-crime podcasts.
The fact that, until recently, “the end of the world” would have seemed pretentious and evasive, and now seems like the only possible answer.
Being stuck in a project that’s not challenging me, or true to my nature.
Being onstage and forgetting why I’m there.
My first holy communion, where my trousers were too big for me and fell down, a circumstance which earned me both the instant contempt of the girls and the heightened interest of the priests. That’s just how it was in 1975.
My interest in Los Angeles.
For world capitalism to grind to a halt.
The other day, when I decided that maybe I had been too harsh on mid-period Sting.
Just. Hanging. On.
Somebody once told me I was the spitting image of David Cameron.
Maureen O'Hara, Bear Grylls, Mike Skinner, John Malkovich, Olivia de Havilland, Michael Flatley
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