The question
What is the harshest thing anyone has said to you?Originally asked
The Guardian, to a different person each week, The Q&A
A fixed Guardian Q&A prompt asked directly across respondents and years.
You answer as yourself. Nobody on FLAPSS answers as anybody else.
A fellow artist called me a flaneur!
The Q&A, The Guardian, 20 June 2026 source ↗
“You’ll never, ever work.” When you are young and full of hopes and dreams it’s devastating. I am just grateful that I thought: “Well, I’m going to try.”
Glenda Jackson said I was an amateur during rehearsal for The White Devil at the Old Vic. I called her a cow, but that was inadequate.
“And for you, sir?” It happens a lot.
I was recently made to feel that it’s my mental health that’s the problem and not the system.
In 2001, when my eldest son died.
A detective. Or a writer. Or a poet.
Picking up RAF pilots’ parachute packs and gear they dropped off in a pile.
Being able to paint the way I do.
Keep working, improving your step.
I hope I’ll find my mother and father in heaven. Only my father would probably say, “You can’t come and live here, boy!”
Mark Radcliffe, Juliet Stevenson, Stockard Channing, Tamsin Greig, Michelle Collins, Jon Snow
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