I’m not fond of snakes.
What is your greatest fear?
Question
How close have you come to death?
Death & what remains
Question
What is the trait you most deplore in others?
Values & belief
Question
What is the worst job you have done?
Craft & work
Question
What does love feel like?
Relationships
Question
If you could edit your past, what would you change?
Failure & regret
Question
What do you consider your greatest achievement?
Craft & work
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’ve been a strong advocate that all my five children should be great swimmers, so you can deduce what my fear is.
The Guardian, The Q&A, The Guardian, 23 November 2024 source ↗
Others on this question
View all 266 →Talking too much.
Carrie Fisher
Actor and writer
A bad death . . . fast or slow.
Terry Gross
Radio interviewer
Living with severe chronic pain, or forgetting the name of the person I’m interviewing.
More from Bryn Terfel
View profile →In 2006, I went fishing for red snapper in the Gulf of Mexico. On the way back, one of the engines caught fire and then we had one engine for 70 miles. Slowly but surely, we got to Baton Rouge in the darkness but then got very close to a very large passing ship – they didn’t see us and we didn’t see them.
Unfriendliness.
I cleaned the toilets at the local pub every Saturday morning.
Full of passion and laughter.
That moment in Bilbao in 2020, when I tried to cross the street and did a pirouette and suffered a dreadful break in my right leg, which means now I have 10 screws and a band in it.
I loved my 1 minute 40 seconds singing at the coronation of King Charles. I was the most nervous I’ve been.
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Also answered this
Rita Moreno, Bonnie Raitt, Maureen O'Hara, Jim Kerr, Audra McDonald, Melissa Etheridge
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