Losing a loved one.
What is your greatest fear?
Question
What is the trait you most deplore in others?
Values & belief
Question
Which trait do you most dislike in yourself?
Identity & self
Question
When were you happiest?
Time & hindsight
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 don’t have any left. I’ve already lost a son. I guess, maybe, that my wife would leave me, but she wouldn’t dare.
Vanity Fair, The Proust Questionnaire, Vanity Fair, November 2015 source ↗
Others on this question
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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.
Every actor has the same fear – ie, you’re never going to work again.
Losing my mind.
More from Mike Wallace
View profile →Self-absorption.
Self-absorption.
Nineteen thirty-nine. Grand Rapids, Michigan. Station WOOD, 20 bucks a week.
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Also answered this · A–Z
Bill Moyers, Bob Schieffer, Caroline Lucas, Charles Osgood, Chris Bryant, Ed Koch
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