Heights, and not getting along with people.
What is your greatest fear?
Question
How close have you come to death?
Death & what remains
Question
What scares you about getting older?
Time & hindsight
Question
What does the first sixty minutes of your day look like?
Daily life
Question
What is your idea of perfect happiness?
Identity & self
Question
What is the best advice you have ever received?
Time & hindsight
Question
Are you afraid of death?
Death & what remains
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.
That human beings will follow their stupid and greedy side, rather than their smart side, and go down the plughole. We’re circling the rim.
Helen Bownass, Five Minute Philosopher, Stylist, 15 October 2019 source ↗
Others on this question
View all 285 →
Kurt Vonnegut
Novelist and essayist
Bad things happening to my children and grandchildren.
Rita Moreno
Actor, singer and dancer
The thought that I might die with unresolved conflicts.
Democracy proves to be a Potemkin village and gross inequality becomes our permanent way of life.
More from Margaret Atwood
View profile →In 1948 when the brakes failed on our car. About to get on a plane to New York on 9/11. Choking on a fishbone.
Long, lingering dementia, followed by death from choking on a fishbone.
I would so much like to have a daily writing schedule. If I had one, I'd probably start about 9.30, write for 2 hours, have lunch, write another 2, then goof off. As it is, I goof off, then panic and write in the evenings. Do not follow my example.
A canoe, mixed sun and cloud, no deadlines in sight.
In 1972, by Farley Mowat, after I’d had a modest success: “Now you’re a target, and people will shoot at you.” Which is not about how to write, but about some of the consequences of having done so.
Of dying, only if painful and protracted, or if I get stuck inside an inert body. I would also not wish to be trapped in a jar.
More on identity & self
- Which trait do you most dislike in yourself? 262 answers
- What did you want to be when you were growing up? 230 answers
- What most recently made you cry? 195 answers
- What is your idea of perfect happiness? 167 answers
- How would you describe yourself in three words? 121 answers
- What are you most proud of? 118 answers
Also answered this
David Hare, J.K. Rowling, Jia Tolentino, Carrie Fisher, Judy Blume, Jack Whitehall
Search the directory for somebody in particular.
Explore further
- All identity & self questions
- The The Proust Questionnaire questionnaire — 5 questions from the same format
- Explore the archive — by field, age, era, and subject