Totalitarianism in Europe.
What is your greatest fear?
Question
What do you value most in your friends?
Relationships
Question
What is your idea of perfect happiness?
Identity & self
Question
Which living person do you most admire, and why?
Values & belief
Question
When were you happiest?
Time & hindsight
Question
Which trait do you most dislike in yourself?
Identity & self
Question
What is the trait you most deplore in others?
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.
A Broadway theater filled with nothing but critics.
Vanity Fair, The Proust Questionnaire, Vanity Fair, December 2021 source ↗
Others on this question
View all 256 →Becoming dickish.
I honestly don’t have a particular fear. We must live life without limits, and fear can become a limit.
Becoming deaf and blind, which is what happened to my father.
More from Mel Brooks
View profile →Taking daily showers and always being there when I need them.
Being in a Broadway theater full of people laughing their heads off at one of my shows.
Probably me, but I don’t think I’m supposed to say that!
Probably during my childhood growing up in Williamsburg, Brooklyn.
Being too damned self-absorbed.
Never picking up the check.
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
James Taylor, Bryn Terfel, DJ Khaled, John Grisham, Hamza Yassin, Marina Abramović
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