The question
What lesson has mattered most in your life?Originally asked
The Guardian, to a different person each week, The Q&A
Verbatim recurring item in The Guardian Q&A; two fully readable publisher-hosted respondent pages establish institutional recurrence.
You answer as yourself. Nobody on FLAPSS answers as anybody else.
Keep working, improving your step.
The Q&A, The Guardian, 20 June 2026 source ↗
One’s created sense of self is not who you are. The present moment is all we have.
That materialistic things will not make you happy.
To live your best life every day, because tomorrow isn’t promised.
Before I was diagnosed with esophageal cancer a year and a half ago, I rather jauntily told the readers of my memoirs that when faced with extinction I wanted to be fully conscious and awake, in order to “do” death in the active and not the passive sense. And I do, still, try to nurture that little flame of curiosity and defiance: willing to play out the string to the end and wishing to be spared nothing that properly belongs to a life span. However, one thing that grave illness does is to make you examine familiar principles and seemingly reliable sayings. And there’s one that I find I am not saying with quite the same conviction as I once used to: In particular, I have slightly stopped issuing the announcement that “Whatever doesn’t kill me makes me stronger.”
My work. What shape will it take?
Being able to paint the way I do.
Recently, as people began to understand what I am trying to do in my painting.
As a nice old man.
Trying to exercise authority over one.
The boozing. I started on rum as a child.
Stockard Channing, Roger Ebert, Steve Jobs, Jason Donovan, Simon Boas, Shobna Gulati
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