Pain of any sort.
What is your greatest fear?
Question
What is the trait you most deplore in others?
Values & belief
Question
What is your idea of perfect happiness?
Identity & self
Question
When were you happiest?
Time & hindsight
Question
Which living person do you most admire, and why?
Values & belief
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.
Sharks. The ones in the ocean.
Vanity Fair, The Proust Questionnaire, Vanity Fair, January 2024 source ↗
Others on this question
View all 255 →
Lily Tomlin
Comedian and actor
Being onstage and forgetting why I’m there.
Christopher Hitchens
Essayist, critic and journalist
Instead, I am badly oppressed by a gnawing sense of waste. I had real plans for my next decade and felt I’d worked hard enough to earn it. Will I really not live to see my children married? To watch the World Trade Center rise again? To read—if not indeed write—the obituaries of elderly villains like Henry Kissinger and Joseph Ratzinger? But I understand this sort of non-thinking for what it is: sentimentality and self-pity.
Fear is for frightened people. I’m not one of those.
More from Mariska Hargitay
View profile →The inability to listen. Inauthentic vocal registers. Calling anything other than food “delicious” or “yummy.”
My family. Together in a room with a sax, a piano, and a Ping-Pong table.
When our family was complete.
People who do hard, honorable work in obscurity.
More on identity & self
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- What most recently made you cry? 193 answers
- What did you want to be when you were growing up? 191 answers
- What is your idea of perfect happiness? 158 answers
- How would you describe yourself in three words? 110 answers
- What are you most proud of? 99 answers
Also answered this · A–Z
Ai Weiwei, Alan Arkin, Alfred Molina, Alison Steadman, Allison Janney, Ally McCoist
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