I would have been better with money.
If you could edit your past, what would you change?
Question
What did you want to be when you were growing up?
Identity & self
Question
Which trait do you most dislike in yourself?
Identity & self
Question
Which book changed the way you think, and what did it change?
Taste & recommendation
Question
Which teacher, parent, coach or friend most made you who you are, and what did you learn from them?
Relationships
Question
How would you describe yourself in three words?
Identity & self
Question
What is your worst intellectual habit?
Craft & work
Originally asked
The Guardian, to a different person each week, The Q&A
Repeated verbatim in The Guardian's long-running Saturday Q&A; two publisher-hosted examples establish recurrence.
You answer as yourself. Nobody on FLAPSS answers as anybody else.
I'd take a course in bread-making and open a small bakery.
Rosanna Greenstreet, The Q&A, The Guardian, 21 March 2009 source ↗
Others on this question
View all 209 →
Julian Lloyd Webber
British cellist and conductor
Nothing: the good times, the bad times, they make your character.
Joss Stone
English singer, songwriter, and actress
It’s all a learning experience, even if it’s a shit time.
Eve Ensler
American playwright, performer, feminist, and activist
I would have honoured my body, I would have lived inside it, cherished it and protected it.
More from Alain de Botton
View profile →At 12, I wanted to be an architect, at 18, a writer, and now, at forty, an architect again. I’m powerfully drawn to everything related to building, but I also love ideas. These are my two passions.
Impatience with difficult projects: panicking and giving up too quickly.
Roland Barthes' 'Camera Lucida'.
I came from a family where books were highly valued, and that set me on the path of reading. Also, my family got out there and did stuff, and so I grew up feeling that you could change things and get things done if you worked hard.
Fear, anxiety, longing, love, art, beauty.
I’m prone to overexplaining things –- when my own understanding of them is shaky. The better I know something, the shorter my prose.
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David Hare, Judith Kerr, Sandi Toksvig, Jack Whitehall, Adam Kay, Mary McCartney
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