Being found out.
Identity & self
What is your greatest fear?
256 answers answered between 1999 and 2026 one of 5 in The Proust Questionnaire
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.
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John Lewis
U.S. Representative from Georgia, 1987–2020; Chairman of the Student Nonviolent Coordinating Committee 1963–1966
As a participant in the movement, as I was sitting in, I came to that point where I lost all sense of fear.
Democracy proves to be a Potemkin village and gross inequality becomes our permanent way of life.
Becoming dickish.
Of choking on some food and having no one nearby to do the Heimlich maneuver.
Mike Wallace
American journalist
I don’t have any left. I’ve already lost a son. I guess, maybe, that my wife would leave me, but she wouldn’t dare.
Talking too much.
The current occupant of the White House.
Malala Yousafzai
Education campaigner; co-founder of the Malala Fund; United Nations Messenger of Peace
Losing my family. And fear that the world won't become a better place.
Gloria Steinem
Writer and feminist organiser
Dying just a millisecond before I was about to say something I really wanted the people I love to hear.
It’s a toss-up between a tarantula crawling on me and dying alone.
Failure. I hate losing, particularly at football and politics. I play five-a-side every week – middle of midfield, barking orders. Some people say it’s the taking part that counts. I am not in that camp. It’s the winning that counts.
Being on my deathbed and realising I’d forgotten to treat each day as the miracle that it is.
Kellie Maloney
Retired boxing manager, promoter and politician
Losing my family.
Failure, being caught out, making an idiot of myself.
Totalitarianism in Europe.
A Reform government.
I become very anxious if I think I’ve hurt someone.
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