Nuclear holocaust.
What is your greatest fear?
Question
Which trait do you most dislike in yourself?
Identity & self
Question
Aside from a property, what is the most expensive thing you have bought?
Money & investment
Question
What is the worst job you have done?
Craft & work
Question
What is the worst thing anyone has said to you?
Failure & regret
Question
What is the most important lesson life has taught you?
Time & hindsight
Question
What does love feel like?
Relationships
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.
Not fulfilling my potential.
The Guardian, The Q&A, The Guardian, 24 June 2023 source ↗
Others on this question
View all 278 →
Cory Taylor
Novelist and screenwriter
He’s always been the family cook. He’s been feeding me since the day we met. Everything I know about Japanese food I know because of him. So now that’s another pleasure gone, perhaps the greatest. I don’t know how long it takes to die of starvation, or whether it hurts, but I dread it, just as I dread my sons watching me go like that. Because that is what they will remember, their mother reduced to a bag of bones. What it will do to Shin I can’t bear to contemplate.
Recorded
Edited extract from Dying: A Memoir, published by Text Publishing, The Guardian, 17 May 2016
source ↗
Losing consciousness or awareness.
That it takes a week for someone to discover my body.
More from Sharon Corr
View profile →Procrastination.
When I initially made money with the Corrs, I bought a Jaguar XK8.
I worked in my aunt’s bar in Dundalk for about eight years and I remember cleaning the whole bar, including the bathrooms, after a particularly rough St Patrick’s Day.
I can’t disclose that because it’s not suitable for public airing, but it was truly awful; they’ve since said worse.
Trust my instincts.
A warm sunny day. You get this bubble around you and, all of a sudden, problems are halved.
More on identity & self
- Which trait do you most dislike in yourself? 257 answers
- What did you want to be when you were growing up? 222 answers
- What most recently made you cry? 193 answers
- What is your idea of perfect happiness? 165 answers
- How would you describe yourself in three words? 120 answers
- What are you most proud of? 116 answers
Also answered this
Antonio Banderas, Meghann Fahy, Fiona Allen, Sophia Loren, John Grisham, Hamza Yassin
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