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The question

What do you fear most?

Originally asked

Vanity Fair, to its interview subject, The Proust Questionnaire

The exact prompt is fixed in Vanity Fair's Proust Questionnaire and independently sustained in The Guardian's The Q&A over multiple decades.

You answer as yourself. Nobody on FLAPSS answers as anybody else.

Others on this question

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Joyce Carol Oates Novelist, short story writer and essayist
Sometimes, it is the possibility of loneliness. Other times, it is the possibility of never being alone, having no privacy, being under the control of another.
Recorded Vanity Fair, The Proust Questionnaire, Vanity Fair, November 2018 source ↗
Cory Taylor Novelist and screenwriter
He’s always been the family cook. He’s been feeding me since the day we met. Everything I know about Japanese food I know because of him. So now that’s another pleasure gone, perhaps the greatest. I don’t know how long it takes to die of starvation, or whether it hurts, but I dread it, just as I dread my sons watching me go like that. Because that is what they will remember, their mother reduced to a bag of bones. What it will do to Shin I can’t bear to contemplate.
Recorded Edited extract from Dying: A Memoir, published by Text Publishing, The Guardian, 17 May 2016 source ↗
Jodie Foster
Naming my greatest fear, because then I’ll have to admit it, won’t I?
Recorded Vanity Fair, The Proust Questionnaire, Vanity Fair, February 2024 source ↗

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