Not being able to work.
What is your greatest fear?
Question
Which writers or artists most influenced your work?
Taste & recommendation
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.
It was desperate because of certain things, ingredients like my father being an alcoholic, my mother having too many babies in too short a time, no work available in Ireland, and even when my father did get a job he drank the wages. Then there was the harsh kind of schooling we had with school masters who ruled with a stick and then because of the overwhelming presence of the church, which imbued us with fear all the time. So it was fear, dampness, poverty, alcoholism, fear of the church, fear of the school masters, fear in general.
Academy of Achievement, Academy of Achievement interview, Washington, D.C., 19 June 1999 source ↗
Others on this question
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Melissa Etheridge
Singer, songwriter and guitarist
To let fear overcome my life. We’re not gonna let that happen because love is always greater than fear.
I honestly don’t have a particular fear. We must live life without limits, and fear can become a limit.
Clothes moths (and the imminent threat of world war three).
More from Frank McCourt
View profile →The last teacher I had was a man named O’Halloran. But he was the only one who offered words of encouragement, who told us we were distinct, unique individuals with a right to think for ourselves. And that was just before we left Leamy’s National School. And he told me, “My boy, you are a literary genius.” And you can imagine what I had to put up with at the schoolyard with all the others. “Hey, McCourt, you’re a literary genius. Look at him. Look at the literary genius.
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Bobbi Brown, Trevor Noah, John Simm, Kerry Godliman, Lena Dunham, Geoffrey Rush
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