Recorded · Vanity Fair · 2010
The absence of fear, and the recognition that we are all on this ship of fools together. We may in fact go to the big ship’s Art Deco bar and have a glass of champagne, toasting our foibles.
The Proust Questionnaire
Vanity Fair, put to its interview subject
The Proust Questionnaire is a set of personal questions — what makes you happy, what you fear, what you would change about yourself — that began as a parlour game, written into the confession albums people kept in the late nineteenth century. It carries Marcel Proust's name because he filled one in as a teenager and again in his twenties, and his answers survived.
Vanity Fair has long run a version of it on its back page, putting the same questions to a different person each issue, and other interviewers, The Guardian's Q&A among them, ask several of the same things.
Background: Proust Questionnaire, Wikipedia
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.
5 questions, 575 answers to them so far. Every one of them is asked here as itself, with the format it came from on the page. Nobody answers as anybody else. 575 of the answers are quoted from interviews in Vanity Fair, The Guardian and elsewhere, each shown with its source. The people quoted did not answer on FLAPSS; members answer the same questions as themselves, and their answers are kept apart from the quotations.
What does happiness look like for you when life is going well?
Musician and record producer
Recorded · Vanity Fair · 2014
Perfection is a second-rate idea. I would guess, however, that perfected happiness would be joy, the most intricate and mercurial of all sensations. The moment one recognizes joy, it flees.
Basketball player and author
Recorded · Vanity Fair · 2020
Being surrounded by my friends and family. Just listening to them interacting, laughing, sharing. It is the culmination of everything I could have hoped for.
Every question in this set
- What do you fear most? 256
- Which quality in your friends matters most to you? 65
- If you could alter one thing about yourself, what would it be? 53
- What kind of death would you consider a good one? 43
- What does happiness look like for you when life is going well? 158
The number is how many answers are on the record here. A dash means nobody has answered it yet, which is an opening rather than a gap.