I’ve a phobia of statues. It does go back to childhood. My parents brought me to look at a French church late at night. Since then I can’t deal with them.
What is your greatest fear?
Question
Which living person do you most admire, and why?
Values & belief
Question
What is your idea of perfect happiness?
Identity & self
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.
That we will be remembered as a people who locked our fellow citizens in cages and who believe that some people are rich and some people are poor because “it’s their nature” and that racism and poverty are inevitable parts of the order of things; that M.L.K. and Bobby Kennedy died in vain; and that no one any longer believes what M.L.K. said in his Nobel Prize address in Oslo: “There is nothing new about poverty. What is new, however, is that we have the resources to get rid of it.”
Vanity Fair, The Proust Questionnaire, Vanity Fair, March 2019 source ↗
Others on this question
View all 256 →Couples who have to be sat side by side at L.A. dinner parties. What is that all about?!
Child, loss or damage thereof.
That we’re all going to hell in a handcart and Trump is driving.
More from Henry Louis Gates Jr.
View profile →It’s a tie between Vernon Eulion Jordan Jr., Wole Soyinka, and Oprah Winfrey. All are fearless, all know themselves, all have examined themselves, and all are comfortable with what they have seen.
Late one Sunday afternoon, my three-year-old granddaughter, out of the blue, took my hand and said she wanted to whisper something to me. Could we go for a ride around the block before we all sat down for dinner? Just the two of us? Holding hands as we walked to and from the car in the driveway: Bliss.
Well, I’m happiest on Martha’s Vineyard, between July 1 and Labor Day, riding my tricycle with Larry Bobo every afternoon and fishing with Buddy Vanderhoop. But I was happiest from my childhood through high school in Piedmont, West Virginia; it was magical. I was sorry when it was time to go off to college.
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- What is your idea of perfect happiness? 158 answers
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Also answered this
Olivia de Havilland, Sophia Loren, Helen George, Gayle King, Keith McNally, Robert Glenister
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