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 ↗
That there are more important things than being right.
I think that is the most important lesson you learn in life, that you have to be ready to make a compromise. You do not compromise your principles, but you have to be ready to compromise. You have to understand that you cannot get your way 100 percent. Life is too complicated. You are not an island, and you work in a social setting, and you need to understand that you work always — at the family level, at the society level — to work out the compromise that is perceived to be fair. You don’t get 100 percent of what you want, but at least you will get the basic minimum that you require.
One’s created sense of self is not who you are. The present moment is all we have.
Want for your brothers and sisters what you want for yourself.
A fellow artist called me a flaneur!
As a nice old man.
My work. What shape will it take?
In the 1950s I went to the Chelsea Arts Club’s New Year’s Eve ball at the Royal Albert Hall dressed as a Christmas pudding, with swimming trunks under my costume and holly in my hair.
Needing order always.
The boozing. I started on rum as a child.
Warren Zevon, Paapa Essiedu, Simon Boas, Richard Coles, Kate Bowler, Robert Carlyle
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