Daily life

What single thing would improve the quality of your life?

206 answers answered between 1932 and 2026 one of 25 in The Q&A

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The Guardian, to a different person each week, The Q&A

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Read by field Everyone Science and medicine 1 Arts and letters 179 Politics and public life 12 Business and finance 5 Sport 9
Read by age Any age Before thirty 8 In their thirties 34 In their forties 38 In their fifties 53 In their sixties 41 Seventy and beyond 29
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Winston Churchill Prime Minister of the United Kingdom, 1940–1945 and 1951–1955; Member of Parliament 1900–1964
The cultivation of a hobby and new forms of interest is therefore a policy of first importance to a public man. But this is not a business that can be undertaken in a day or swiftly improvised by a mere command of the will. The growth of alternative mental interests is a long process. The seeds must be carefully chosen; they must fall on good ground; they must be sedulously tended, if the vivifying fruits are to be at hand when needed. To be really happy and really safe, one ought to have at least two or three hobbies, and they must all be real.
Recorded Essay first published in the Strand Magazine in 1921–22 and collected in Amid These Storms, 1932, Winston S. Churchill, Painting as a Pastime, Project Gutenberg Canada, 1932 source ↗
Ram Dass Spiritual teacher and author
This is why I could speak the way I did yesterday. In California, the stroke is incredible grace because it gives me a prescription to buy pot. ... Pot takes away the pain and frees me from spasticity. ... The marijuana gives me soul perspective. It makes the stroke livable.
Recorded Sara Davidson, The New York Times Magazine, at the Hyatt Regency, San Francisco, 21 May 2000 source ↗
Christopher Hitchens Essayist, critic and journalist
My chief consolation in this year of living dyingly has been the presence of friends. I can’t eat or drink for pleasure anymore, so when they offer to come it’s only for the blessed chance to talk. Some of these comrades can easily fill a hall with paying customers avid to hear them: they are talkers with whom it’s a privilege just to keep up. Now at least I can do the listening for free. Can they come and see me? Yes, but only in a way. So now every day I go to a waiting room, and watch the awful news from Japan on cable TV (often closed-captioned, just to torture myself) and wait impatiently for a high dose of protons to be fired into my body at two-thirds the speed of light. What do I hope for? If not a cure, then a remission. And what do I want back? In the most beautiful apposition of two of the simplest words in our language: the freedom of speech.
Recorded Vanity Fair, 9 May 2011 source ↗
Steffi Graf German tennis player
A pause button. If I could be watching my kids enjoy something, and hit pause to make it last.
Recorded The Guardian, The Q&A, The Guardian, 22 June 2013 source ↗
Jake Bugg English singer-songwriter
I already feel like I have more than I could ever wish for.
Recorded The Guardian, The Q&A, The Guardian, 27 July 2013 source ↗

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