Something happening to one of my children.
What is your greatest fear?
Question
How close have you come to death?
Death & what remains
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Which moment embarrassed you most?
Failure & regret
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Which trait do you most dislike in yourself?
Identity & self
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If you could edit your past, what would you change?
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What is the worst thing anyone has said to you?
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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.
I’ve been a strong advocate that all my five children should be great swimmers, so you can deduce what my fear is.
The Guardian, The Q&A, The Guardian, 23 November 2024 source ↗
Others on this question
View all 255 →
Judy Blume
Novelist
That we’re going down the tubes as a country (make that the whole world).
Totalitarianism in Europe.
Jason Manford
English comedian and singer
Wasting my life.
More from Bryn Terfel
View profile →In 2006, I went fishing for red snapper in the Gulf of Mexico. On the way back, one of the engines caught fire and then we had one engine for 70 miles. Slowly but surely, we got to Baton Rouge in the darkness but then got very close to a very large passing ship – they didn’t see us and we didn’t see them.
One horrible afternoon in Chicago when I forgot my words in The Marriage of Figaro, in a role I’d sung hundreds of times.
Thinking that singing makes me fit.
That moment in Bilbao in 2020, when I tried to cross the street and did a pirouette and suffered a dreadful break in my right leg, which means now I have 10 screws and a band in it.
“You’re a wonderful musician but a terrible friend.” It was Daniel Barenboim, the famous conductor, because I didn’t have time in the calendar to work with him.
Full of passion and laughter.
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