Contentment with what I have.
What is your idea of perfect happiness?
Question
What is your greatest fear?
Identity & self
Question
When were you happiest?
Time & hindsight
Question
What is the trait you most deplore in others?
Values & belief
Question
Which trait do you most dislike in yourself?
Identity & self
Originally asked
Vanity Fair, to its interview subject, The Proust Questionnaire
Verbatim recurring item in Vanity Fair's Proust Questionnaire; two publisher-hosted respondent pages establish institutional recurrence.
You answer as yourself. Nobody on FLAPSS answers as anybody else.
Creating something and feeling proud of it.
The Proust Questionnaire, Vanity Fair, 25 October 2024 source ↗
Others on this question
View all 158 →
Joyce Carol Oates
Novelist, short story writer and essayist
“Perfect happiness!”—waking in the morning to a clear & benevolent-seeming sky, a view from a window of a beautiful (if overgrown) garden, a cat purring. The excitement of rewriting the previous day’s work, & continuing on from that point energized & hopeful. For a writer, “happiness” isn’t likely to ever be “perfect”—but it is likely to be bound up with the work-in-progress. First drafts tend to be frustrating, exhausting—subsequent drafts sometimes move swiftly, even miraculously. For most adults, “Perfect is the enemy of good”—we learn to appreciate whatever measure of happiness we have, however modest.
It’s never going to be absolutely perfect. There will always be something you would change if you could.
The very short instant right after accomplishing something very challenging.
More from John Lithgow
View profile →Climate change, duh.
Probably the curtain call of my final performance when I played King Lear.
Three versions of the same trait: deceit, hypocrisy, and manipulativeness.
Conflict aversion.
More on identity & self
- What is your greatest fear? 256 answers
- Which trait do you most dislike in yourself? 243 answers
- What did you want to be when you were growing up? 195 answers
- What most recently made you cry? 193 answers
- How would you describe yourself in three words? 111 answers
- What are you most proud of? 103 answers
Also answered this
DJ Khaled, James Taylor, Betty White, George Takei, Antonio Banderas, Sophia Loren
Search the directory for somebody in particular.
Explore further
- All identity & self questions
- The The Proust Questionnaire questionnaire — 5 questions from the same format
- Explore the archive — by field, age, era, and subject