Lauren Bacall: What is your idea of perfect happiness?

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.

Recorded Lauren Bacall said elsewhere, not written here

Waking up in the morning.

The Proust Questionnaire, Vanity Fair, 1 April 2004 source ↗

Others on this question

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DJ Khaled

Health, life, everything around me on a daily basis, being grateful for life—every day is a blessing.

Recorded The Proust Questionnaire, Vanity Fair, 18 November 2016 source ↗

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.

Recorded The Proust Questionnaire, Vanity Fair, 28 November 2018 source ↗

Judd Apatow

Watching my wife and children eat.

Recorded The Proust Questionnaire, Vanity Fair, 1 July 2009 source ↗

Karl Ove Knausgård Novelist

Being together with the ones I love on a Wednesday afternoon, washing the dishes, taking the garbage to the bin under a gray sky, hearing the distant sounds of children from upstairs, turning around and suddenly looking into the eyes of the one I love. It is the feeling of being alive I’m talking about. And of being in love.

Recorded The Proust Questionnaire, Vanity Fair, 29 December 2017 source ↗