I need a long and lingering death to make sure that I have time to have a deathbed conversion.
Vanity Fair, The Proust Questionnaire, Vanity Fair, 18 December 2015 source ↗
The question
What kind of death would you consider a good one?Originally asked
Vanity Fair, to its interview subject, The Proust Questionnaire
A fixed final question in Vanity Fair's Proust Questionnaire, repeated verbatim across respondent pages.
You answer as yourself. Nobody on FLAPSS answers as anybody else.
Others on this question
View all 43 →
Diana Athill
Editor and memoirist
That process depends on what you are dying of. The body can fail in ways that are extremely distressing, slowly and painfully, demanding much stoicism, or it can switch off with little more than a flash of dizziness. In my family we seem to have been uncommonly lucky in that respect. There was the 82-year-old uncle who was at a meet of the Norwich Stag Hounds, enjoying a drink with friends, when crash! And he fell off his horse, dead. There was the cousin in her eighties who fell dead as she was filling a kettle to make tea, and the other cousin, 98, who slipped away so gently that the sister who was holding her hand didn’t realise that she had stopped breathing.
Diane Keaton
Actor and director
Like? I have no soft spot, fondness, admiration, respect, attraction, or esteem for death. I am not taken with it or infatuated by it. I carry no torch, have no crush, take no shine to the word or action of death. I don’t have the hots for it, and I don’t dig it, either.
Al Franken
Senator and comedian
Surrounded by my great-great-grandchildren.
Neil Patrick Harris
Actor
Quickly and by surprise. I don’t want the specter of death to linger.
More from John Mellencamp
View profile →My quick temper and the chaos that ensues in the hurricane that follows.
It’s not our God-given right to be happy. So, if a man can laugh out loud once or twice a day, that would be happiness.
Ungratefulness.
More on death & what remains
- How would you want people to remember you? 213 answers
- How close have you come to dying? 209 answers
- What song would you want played at your funeral? 178 answers
- If you had only one day left, how would you spend it — and what would you deliberately avoid? 54 answers
- What do you believe happens when we die? 50 answers
- What would you most want to leave your children? 44 answers
Also answered this
Audra McDonald, Bonnie Raitt, Rita Moreno, Hans Zimmer, T Bone Burnett, Dolly Parton
Search the directory for somebody in particular.
Explore further
- All death & what remains questions
- The The Proust Questionnaire questionnaire — 5 questions from the same format
- Explore the archive — by field, age, era, and subject