John Malkovich
American actor
A baseball pitcher.
What did you want to be when you were growing up?
Question
How do you balance creative work with other responsibilities?
Daily life
Question
What important truth do very few people agree with you on?
Values & belief
Question
How does a new work begin for you?
Craft & work
Question
What scares you about getting older?
Time & hindsight
Question
What is your idea of perfect happiness?
Identity & self
Question
When were you happiest?
Time & hindsight
Originally asked
The Guardian, to a different person each week, The Q&A
This is a standing question in The Guardian's decades-long The Q&A and also recurs independently in career and life interviews.
You answer as yourself. Nobody on FLAPSS answers as anybody else.
Well, in a certain sense, the decision that I was the one who was going to be writing was already formed when I was 12 years old when I was spending those winter evenings reading Verne and other authors; I thought then that books were the best thing in the world. That this was something I wanted to do.
Andrzej Wolski, Web of Stories source ↗
Others on this question
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Sara Pascoe
English comedian, presenter, writer
To be looked at.
An artist, an interior designer and a vet.
Nish Kumar
British stand-up comedian and presenter
Something in comedy. It was either this or Jimi Hendrix.
More from Adam Zagajewski
View profile →Generally, my hours are during the first part of the day; hardly ever in the evening. The hours nearer noon, the zenith of the day, are good for working.
Why ardor? Because, I think, there’s not enough of it in our time. Or, at least in our literature. There’s too much lukewarm irony, too much sophisticated indulgence. The tragic dimension disappears in this intellectual environment. That’s why ardor is to be defended.
This poem—I still remember the emotion which accompanied its beginnings, actually just the birth of the line “try to praise the mutilated world”; it happened in a train in Germany, I think (trains are good for inspiration, sometimes). It was for me a simple juxtaposition of two contrary deeply felt convictions.
The good part of aging is that you read more and more. You discover poets you never heard of when you were younger.
Happiness springs from having found a form of expression that also earns recognition.
Young people don’t know that they’re young. We were happy because we felt we were doing something positive and our poems were reaching people in spite of all the censorship and police issues.
More on identity & self
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Richard Coles, Adrian Edmondson, Shirley MacLaine, Armistead Maupin, Dawn O'Porter, Hayley Squires
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