That they can pick up where we left off.
What do you value most in your friends?
Question
What is your greatest fear?
Identity & self
Question
How would you like to die?
Death & what remains
Question
What is your idea of perfect happiness?
Identity & self
Question
When were you happiest?
Time & hindsight
Originally asked
Vanity Fair, to its interview subject, The Proust Questionnaire
A fixed Vanity Fair Proust Questionnaire item asked across its three-decade archive, with independent variants in friendship and profile interviews.
You answer as yourself. Nobody on FLAPSS answers as anybody else.
Knowing when to show up and when to go home.
The Proust Questionnaire, Vanity Fair, 2 March 2018 source ↗
Others on this question
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Julie Taymor
Theatre and film director
Love of fun and food and great conversation.
Terry Gross
Radio interviewer
Their willingness to put up with my endless explanations about why I can’t see them because I’m under deadline.
Warren Buffett
Chairman and chief executive of Berkshire Hathaway, 1970–2025
The asset I most value, aside from health, is interesting, diverse, and long-standing friends.
Recorded
His own pledge letter, written on joining the Giving Pledge in 2010, The Giving Pledge, 2010
source ↗
More from Sally Mann
View profile →The loss of a child.
Quickly, without warning, maybe even in my sleep, and while we're putting in requests: before I lose my mind and my ability to gallop across the countryside on horseback.
Reading. And, in particular, reading on the deck of the cabin while my children play in the river below.
On the island of Bequia—one summer, out of the blue, a benefactor (thank you, Charlene) flew our entire family there and put us up in a cliffside house that was a weird mixture of Gaudí and Fred Flintstone and where we went to sleep at eight and got up at five. In between we read, swam, hiked, and unknowingly enjoyed the last moment before the irrevocable shear of adolescence set in.
More on relationships
Also answered this
Amy Poehler, Monica Lewinsky, Mary Tyler Moore, Malala Yousafzai, David Hyde Pierce, Little Richard
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