Lily Tomlin
Comedian and actor
Being onstage and forgetting why I’m there.
What is your greatest fear?
Question
What has been your biggest disappointment?
Failure & regret
Question
When was the last time you changed your mind about something?
Change of mind
Question
What scares you about getting older?
Time & hindsight
Question
How would you describe yourself in three words?
Identity & self
Question
What is your worst intellectual habit?
Craft & work
Question
Which trait do you most dislike in yourself?
Identity & self
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 being loved.
The Q&A, The Guardian, 14 March 2026 source ↗
Others on this question
View all 284 →
David Hasselhoff
American actor, singer, and television personality
Not working and not being able to continue to live this lifestyle.
A.J. Jacobs
Journalist and author of The Year of Living Biblically
Saying something dumb on Twitter and getting yelled at by thousands of strangers. Also, catastrophic climate change.
Harlan Coben
American author
I don’t even voice them. Perhaps the books are my outlet here.
More from Sarah Perry
View profile →My A-level results in 1998. I flunked my history A-level and lost my place at Cambridge. It broke my heart for years; now I’m really glad, because I pull out the whole “I went to a polytechnic” thing. But at the time for a teenager who was rather pleased with herself, it was absolutely devastating.
I am so obdurate I do not change my mind.
I understand that you lose the register of hearing that enables you to hear crickets, and when I can’t hear crickets in the summer I’ll be really sad.
Impatient, ambitious and happy.
I’ve a deplorable tendency to become entrenched in my own prejudices: If I dislike an artist, an art form, or an idea (jazz, ballet, certain kinds of fiction) it is extremely difficult to get me to change my mind, and all evidence presented to the contrary will be discarded and very likely mocked. Of course, nobody suffers but me.
I’m monstrously judgmental. It’s like talking to the pope.
More on identity & self
- Which trait do you most dislike in yourself? 260 answers
- What did you want to be when you were growing up? 228 answers
- What most recently made you cry? 195 answers
- What is your idea of perfect happiness? 167 answers
- How would you describe yourself in three words? 121 answers
- What are you most proud of? 118 answers
Also answered this
Daphne Guinness, Tom Lubbock, Scott Mills, Sally Field, Serena Williams, Danielle Steel
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- All identity & self questions
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