Ashley Walters
British actor and rapper
My primary school years.
When were you happiest?
Question
How would you like to die?
Death & what remains
Question
What is your idea of perfect happiness?
Identity & self
Originally asked
The Guardian, to a different person each week, The Q&A
Asked in 52 of the 131 consecutive instalments of The Guardian's The Q&A harvested on 2026-08-29.
You answer as yourself. Nobody on FLAPSS answers as anybody else.
My happiest moment was being in the room when my daughter was born, and seeing her draw her first breath and turn from what looked like gray clay into the deepest, most vibrant, most psychedelic crimson. It was an unforgettable, unimaginable explosion of energy and potential—of promise and pure love.
Vanity Fair, The Proust Questionnaire, Vanity Fair, January 2014 source ↗
Others on this question
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Ed Harris
American actor and director
The day our daughter was born, or maybe fishing on the Colorado river with my wife and brother and his buddy Earl.
Lucy Worsley
English historian
I think you can be happy every day, if you are in the flow.
Shappi Khorsandi
Iranian-born British comedian
Right now. Ask me again when my children are grown, and I’ll sob, “When they loved me more than that woman/man they’ve shacked up with.”
More from T Bone Burnett
View profile →I would like to die in good health, at an old age, in a house on a mountain that looks out over the ocean, dreaming about everyone and everything I have had the impossible good fortune to have loved. Maybe Ralph Stanley is singing “Angel Band.”
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. I’m not sure where Proust is going with this line of questioning, and I don’t want to be evasive, so I will say my idea of perfect happiness is the end of economics; we grow like flowers and fly like birds; the lion lays down with the lamb—a ridiculous idea.
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