Daryl McCormack
Irish actor
Not actualising my full potential.
What is your greatest fear?
Question
What do you value most in your friends?
Relationships
Question
Which living person do you most admire, and why?
Values & belief
Question
When were you happiest?
Time & hindsight
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.
Personal: health. Globally: nuclear weapons.
Vanity Fair, The Proust Questionnaire, Vanity Fair, March 2011 source ↗
Others on this question
View all 256 →
Hugh Grant
Actor
The cat bowls. With the old cat food dried on like cement.
Christiane Nüsslein-Volhard
Developmental biologist; Nobel laureate in Physiology or Medicine, 1995
I don’t think it’s misused yet, people are afraid of it might be misused but on the other hand, there is also value in finding out about the relation between several particular predispositions. You might be more careful if you are told that your genetic background is such that you shouldn’t eat fat in large amounts or so, it does help you change your life a little bit and so it’s not so bad, but it’s hard to find out which genetic background is causing these things.
Recorded
Marika Griehsel, Interview at the 53rd Lindau Nobel Laureate Meeting, 30 June–4 July 2003, Nobel Prize Outreach, 1 July 2003
source ↗
Joyce Carol Oates
Novelist, short story writer and essayist
Sometimes, it is the possibility of loneliness. Other times, it is the possibility of never being alone, having no privacy, being under the control of another.
More from Michael Douglas
View profile →If I haven’t seen them in years and yet can pick up conversation like it was yesterday.
Any cancer survivor.
The 60s at the University of California at Santa Barbara weren’t bad.
More on identity & self
- Which trait do you most dislike in yourself? 243 answers
- What did you want to be when you were growing up? 195 answers
- What most recently made you cry? 193 answers
- What is your idea of perfect happiness? 158 answers
- How would you describe yourself in three words? 111 answers
- What are you most proud of? 103 answers
Also answered this
Fran Lebowitz, Seth Meyers, Andrew O’Hagan, Willem Dafoe, Gayle King, Lily Tomlin
Search the directory for somebody in particular.
Explore further
- All identity & self questions
- The The Proust Questionnaire questionnaire — 5 questions from the same format
- Explore the archive — by field, age, era, and subject