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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.

HJ
Henry Louis Gates Jr.
Recorded said elsewhere, not written here
That we will be remembered as a people who locked our fellow citizens in cages and who believe that some people are rich and some people are poor because “it’s their nature” and that racism and poverty are inevitable parts of the order of things; that M.L.K. and Bobby Kennedy died in vain; and that no one any longer believes what M.L.K. said in his Nobel Prize address in Oslo: “There is nothing new about poverty. What is new, however, is that we have the resources to get rid of it.”

Vanity Fair, The Proust Questionnaire, Vanity Fair, March 2019 source ↗

Others on this question

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Judy Blume Novelist
That we’re going down the tubes as a country (make that the whole world).
Recorded Vanity Fair, The Proust Questionnaire, Vanity Fair, April 2023 source ↗
Sofia Coppola American filmmaker and actress
Being stuck in a project that’s not challenging me, or true to my nature.
Recorded The Guardian, The Q&A, The Guardian, 18 March 2023 source ↗

More from Henry Louis Gates Jr.

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Question What period or moment in your life brought you the most joy? Time & hindsight
Well, I’m happiest on Martha’s Vineyard, between July 1 and Labor Day, riding my tricycle with Larry Bobo every afternoon and fishing with Buddy Vanderhoop. But I was happiest from my childhood through high school in Piedmont, West Virginia; it was magical. I was sorry when it was time to go off to college.
Recorded Vanity Fair, The Proust Questionnaire, Vanity Fair, March 2019 source ↗
Question What does happiness look like for you when life is going well? Identity & self
Late one Sunday afternoon, my three-year-old granddaughter, out of the blue, took my hand and said she wanted to whisper something to me. Could we go for a ride around the block before we all sat down for dinner? Just the two of us? Holding hands as we walked to and from the car in the driveway: Bliss.
Recorded The Proust Questionnaire, Vanity Fair, 28 March 2019 source ↗

More on identity & self

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Matthew Modine, Diahann Carroll, Edward Enninful, Lena Dunham, Trevor Noah, Bobbi Brown

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