A bumpy flight … or driving with my son Sam, who drives great, but I still can’t believe he’s old enough.
Vanity Fair, The Proust Questionnaire, Vanity Fair, March 2016 source ↗
The question
What do you fear most?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.
Others on this question
View all 256 →
Frank McCourt
Teacher and memoirist; winner of the Pulitzer Prize for Biography or Autobiography
It was desperate because of certain things, ingredients like my father being an alcoholic, my mother having too many babies in too short a time, no work available in Ireland, and even when my father did get a job he drank the wages. Then there was the harsh kind of schooling we had with school masters who ruled with a stick and then because of the overwhelming presence of the church, which imbued us with fear all the time. So it was fear, dampness, poverty, alcoholism, fear of the church, fear of the school masters, fear in general.
Recorded
Academy of Achievement, Academy of Achievement interview, Washington, D.C., 19 June 1999
source ↗
John Grisham
American writer and lawyer
Having a stroke.
That I’ll die worrying.
Both my grandmother and my mother got dementia. My grandmother has passed away. My mother is in a home. Dementia is my biggest fear because it robs you of the very thing that makes life special.
More from Sally Field
View profile →I’d be more patient, which I didn’t consider a virtue until right this moment.
That they won’t let me hide.
Overall I’d have to say my earnestness.
Malala Yousafzai, Martina Navratilova, Misty Copeland, and Hillary Clinton.
When I’m extremely old during a huge family celebration where everyone is playing games and giving pre-written toasts … to me.
Being inside and watching really bad weather outside … and, if it’s after 5:30 P.M., with a glass of Chardonnay in hand.
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