Matthew Modine
American actor
Having a great fear.
What is your greatest fear?
Question
What is the best advice you have ever received?
Time & hindsight
Question
How has a failure, or apparent failure, set you up for later success? Do you have a favourite failure?
Failure & regret
Question
What inspires you to learn?
Attention & the world
Question
What is an unusual habit or an absurd thing that you love?
Daily life
Question
What have you come to understand about what it means to be human?
Values & belief
Question
What important truth do very few people agree with you on?
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.
The greatest fear I always had in the jobs I was in was that some son of a bitch I never knew or met was going to screw up, and I was going to get blamed for it. [laughs]
William J. Antholis, Presidential Oral Histories, Miller Center, 30 September 2021 source ↗
Others on this question
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Paul McKenna
British hypnotist and TV personality
My wife dying. I wouldn’t know how to go on.
I fear the arrogance we are all at risk of, the pride that pushes us to put “I” in place of “God”. More prosaically, I fear physical pain because it risks stripping us of our dignity.
Not waking up in the morning.
More from Leon Panetta
View profile →And I never forgot what he said, Bill Clinton. He looked at me, and he said, “You know, Leon, you can be the greatest OMB director in the history of the world, but nobody’s going to remember you if the White House has fallen apart!” I never forgot that.
You can see your political career going up in smoke, but more importantly, you also worry about your family.
one of the things that I learned — and I also pass this on to our students — which is that knowledge is power.
Could I imagine a world without cursing? Hell, no! Every place I've ever gone, people have had to hold their ears.
There is a dignity associated with people, no matter where the hell they come from — whether they come from Italy or Ireland or Germany or Asia or Africa.
But if our institutions of democracy are not working, that is an even greater threat to our national security
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Also answered this
Charles Osgood, Gloria Steinem, Bob Schieffer, Keir Starmer, Caroline Lucas, Monica Lewinsky
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