Totalitarianism in Europe.
What is your greatest fear?
Question
When were you happiest?
Time & hindsight
Question
Aside from a property, what is the most expensive thing you have bought?
Money & investment
Question
What would you like to leave your children?
Death & what remains
Question
What scares you about getting older?
Time & hindsight
Question
What is the worst thing anyone has said to you?
Failure & regret
Question
Which book are you ashamed not to have read?
Taste & recommendation
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.
Not having the people I love around me.
The Q&A, The Guardian, 16 November 2024 source ↗
Others on this question
View all 256 →
Harlan Coben
American author
I don’t even voice them. Perhaps the books are my outlet here.
That we will be remembered as a people who locked our fellow citizens in cages and who believe that some people are rich and some people are poor because “it’s their nature” and that racism and poverty are inevitable parts of the order of things; that M.L.K. and Bobby Kennedy died in vain; and that no one any longer believes what M.L.K. said in his Nobel Prize address in Oslo: “There is nothing new about poverty. What is new, however, is that we have the resources to get rid of it.”
Getting to the end and thinking that I haven’t laughed enough.
More from Ally McCoist
View profile →In the 18-yard box.
A holiday in New York for my son Arran’s 18th.
Happy memories.
Losing the ability to get about.
“You’re getting old.” My son Harris was factually correct, but I didn’t need to hear it.
To Kill a Mockingbird.
More on identity & self
- Which trait do you most dislike in yourself? 243 answers
- What did you want to be when you were growing up? 195 answers
- What most recently made you cry? 193 answers
- What is your idea of perfect happiness? 158 answers
- How would you describe yourself in three words? 111 answers
- What are you most proud of? 103 answers
Also answered this
Paul Merson, Rafael Nadal, Derek Jeter, Kareem Abdul-Jabbar, Scottie Pippen, Serena Williams
Search the directory for somebody in particular.
Explore further
- All identity & self questions
- The The Proust Questionnaire questionnaire — 5 questions from the same format
- Explore the archive — by field, age, era, and subject