I can’t deal with any level of stress.
Which trait do you most dislike in yourself?
Question
What are bad recommendations you hear in your profession or area of expertise?
Craft & work
Question
Which living person do you most admire, and why?
Values & belief
Question
In the last five years, what have you become better at saying no to?
Daily life
Question
What is your idea of perfect happiness?
Identity & self
Question
What is your greatest fear?
Identity & self
Question
How would you like to die?
Death & what remains
Originally asked
The Guardian, to a different person each week, The Q&A
The Guardian's The Q&A has retained this Proust-derived prompt from at least 2007 through 2026, and ABC independently put it to the Obamas in 2011.
You answer as yourself. Nobody on FLAPSS answers as anybody else.
Narcissism, solipsism.
Vanity Fair, The Proust Questionnaire, Vanity Fair, November 2016 source ↗
Others on this question
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Bruce Dickinson
English heavy metal singer
Procrastination.
Self-loathing that rises to the level of deploring.
When I’m feeling lazy and I sleep in too much.
More from Zadie Smith
View profile →Don’t romanticise your “vocation”. You can either write good sentences or you can’t. There is no “writer’s lifestyle”. All that matters is what you leave on the page.
I feel almost certain I don't know them. It would be one of these types who dedicate their lives to the welfare of others, whereas the people I tend to know are people making stories out of the dramas of themselves.
Protect the time and space in which you write. Keep everybody away from it, even the people who are most important to you.
Reading quietly, in high grass, among loved ones (who are also quietly reading). Followed by a boozy lunch.
Violent death. Death generally.
Oblivious to the event or on the brink of a genuine religious conversion.
More on identity & self
Also answered this
Jacqueline Wilson, Fay Ripley, John Grisham, Joyce Carol Oates, Julian Clary, Frank Cottrell-Boyce
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