Humor. Laughing with my girlfriends is one of my great joys.
What do you value most in your friends?
Question
Do you rely on inspiration or discipline to make work?
Craft & work
Question
Which book changed the way you think, and what did it change?
Taste & recommendation
Question
What advice would you give your twenty-year-old self, and what should they ignore?
Time & hindsight
Question
Which writers or artists most influenced your work?
Taste & recommendation
Question
What does love feel like?
Relationships
Question
What is your greatest fear?
Identity & self
Originally asked
Vanity Fair, to its interview subject, The Proust Questionnaire
A fixed Vanity Fair Proust Questionnaire item asked across its three-decade archive, with independent variants in friendship and profile interviews.
You answer as yourself. Nobody on FLAPSS answers as anybody else.
What makes life worth living are the saints I meet-they can be long-time friends or someone I meet on a street. They find a way to behave decently in an indecent society.
The Harvard Crimson, The Harvard Crimson, 12 May 2000 source ↗
Others on this question
View all 77 →They’re wonderful people who seem to like me!
Sonia Sotomayor
Associate Justice of the Supreme Court of the United States, 2009–present
Find the friends who do that. Find the friends who never tell you that you can’t do it, but who point you in the right direction, hold you when you fail, and push you when you need the push. Those are hard friends to value sometimes, but they are the best of friends.
Warren Buffett
Chairman and chief executive of Berkshire Hathaway, 1970–2025
The asset I most value, aside from health, is interesting, diverse, and long-standing friends.
Recorded
His own pledge letter, written on joining the Giving Pledge in 2010, The Giving Pledge, 2010
source ↗
More from Kurt Vonnegut
View profile →I don’t think I can control my life or my writing. Every other writer I know feels he is steering himself, and I don’t have that feeling. I don’t have that sort of control. I’m simply becoming.
“Candide” by Voltaire, I guess.
The real goal is to make your soul go, not to make a living. Practicing art, even in a mediocre way, can make the soul go.
I am from a family of artists. Here I am making a living in the arts, and it has not been a rebellion. It’s as though I had taken over the family Esso station. My ancestors were all in the arts, so I’m simply making my living in the customary family way.
What makes life worth living are the saints I meet-they can be long-time friends or someone I meet on a street. They find a way to behave decently in an indecent society.
Bad things happening to my children and grandchildren.
More on relationships
Also answered this
Richard Ford, Judy Blume, Eugene Levy, Danielle Steel, A.J. Jacobs, Elmore Leonard
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- The The Proust Questionnaire questionnaire — 5 questions from the same format
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