The question
What is the trait you most deplore in others?Originally asked
The Guardian, to a different person each week, The Q&A
A verbatim standing question in The Guardian's rotating Q&A questionnaire, documented across respondents and years.
You answer as yourself. Nobody on FLAPSS answers as anybody else.
An inability to see the other side.
The Q&A, The Guardian, 4 July 2026 source ↗
Making people smaller than they are because of something they can’t handle in themselves.
Generally speaking, envy, resentment, revenge, and self-pity are disastrous modes of thought. Self-pity gets pretty close to paranoia and paranoia is one of the very hardest things to reverse. You do not want to drift into self-pity.
Cruelty. I don’t see the point.
I don’t like it when people manipulate your words, which sometimes happens in the tabloids.
For the words to fly from my fingers as just occasionally they do.
Last week, when I decided to rewrite the children’s book I’ve been working on.
I bumped into an old schoolteacher and her even more ancient and deaf sister, and she shouted to her, “Remember Esther? Now she writes books … ABOUT HERSELF.”
I can always see two points of view, which makes it hard to have a row.
Sorry is such an underrated word – I use it liberally.
My parents died within four days of each other. I was engulfed as I ran from one bedside to another.
Joyce Carol Oates, Rafael Nadal, Brandi Carlile, Terry Gross, Adam Kay, Alison Steadman
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