Patti Smith
Musician, poet and photographer
Tramping through the woods in South Jersey in 1957 with my dog Bambi.
When were you happiest?
Question
What is your idea of perfect happiness?
Identity & self
Question
Which living person do you most admire, and why?
Values & belief
Question
What is your greatest fear?
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.
I don’t remember the womb, so … my first taste of ice cream? First night in a girl’s bed: happy.
Vanity Fair, The Proust Questionnaire, Vanity Fair, May 2015 source ↗
Others on this question
View all 576 →
Boris Becker
German tennis player, coach, and commentator
I am happiest with my family.
Fran Lebowitz
American author and public speaker
The moment I realised I knew how to read. I was five.
There are different kinds of happiness, but the simplest was when I was 13 because what one had to do was so obvious.
More from James Taylor
View profile →Happiness is going to come and go, but to have a chance at intermittent happiness you need to be free from fear. In our culture, in our day, we can lose sight of what a rare gift that is: to live free from fear
Noam Chomsky, Barack Obama.
Still nuclear annihilation.
More on time & hindsight
- What is the most important lesson life has taught you? 133 answers
- What advice would you give your twenty-year-old self, and what should they ignore? 73 answers
- What scares you about getting older? 59 answers
- What is the best advice you have ever received? 25 answers
- If you could have a gigantic billboard anywhere, what would it say and why? 23 answers
- What is something you were told by a parent, teacher, or mentor that you still repeat to yourself? 22 answers
Also answered this · A–Z
Abi Morgan, Abigail Breslin, Adam Kay, Adeel Akhtar, Adrian Dunbar, Adrian Edmondson
Search the directory for somebody in particular.
Explore further
- All time & hindsight questions
- The The Q&A questionnaire — 25 questions from the same format
- Explore the archive — by field, age, era, and subject