Alice Waters
Chef, restaurateur and food activist
The inclination to pretend I read a friend’s book when maybe I didn’t completely finish.
Which trait do you most dislike in yourself?
Question
How does a new work begin for you?
Craft & work
Question
Whom do you read even though you disagree with them?
Attention & the world
Question
What are bad recommendations you hear in your profession or area of expertise?
Craft & work
Question
What is your worst intellectual habit?
Craft & work
Question
What is one of the best or most worthwhile investments you have ever made — of money, time, or energy?
Money & investment
Question
What problem are you still trying to solve?
Craft & work
Originally asked
The Guardian, to a different person each week, The Q&A
The Guardian's The Q&A has retained this Proust-derived prompt from at least 2007 through 2026, and ABC independently put it to the Obamas in 2011.
You answer as yourself. Nobody on FLAPSS answers as anybody else.
I don’t think I am either as ruthlessly selfish as I was then, but I think that unhappiness made me terribly terribly selfish.
Jasper Rees, Q&A, The Arts Desk, 10 October 2009 source ↗
Others on this question
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Robert Glenister
English actor
Lack of confidence.
Charlotte Church
Welsh singer-songwriter and actress
Procrastination.
Impatience and vanity.
More from David Hare
View profile →Just circumstance. I was running a small theatre group and somebody didn’t deliver a play.
I’ve been reading – and fighting – Maggie Nelson’s The Argonauts; feeling admiration and anger in equal parts.
Never take advice from anyone with no investment in the outcome.
if you have never suffered from self-loathing, lucky you.
I threw my lot in with the theatre and in terms of the pleasure it's given me, I've never regretted it, not even for a second.
I would like to write a play which doesn’t disappoint me 20 years later.
More on identity & self
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Rose Tremain, Zadie Smith, Danielle Steel, Fay Ripley, Alain de Botton, Jacqueline Wilson
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