The question

What do you fear most?

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.

Aung San Suu Kyi

Leader of the National League for Democracy; Nobel Peace Prize laureate; State Counsellor of Myanmar, 2016–2021

Recorded said elsewhere, not written here
To be forgotten too is to die a little. It is to lose some of the links that anchor us to the rest of humanity.

Oslo City Hall, The Nobel Foundation, 16 June 2012 source ↗

2 versions

Earlier wording is kept rather than replaced. This is the record of how the answer moved, not evidence that it should not have.

  1. Version 1 superseded 8 Sep 2026
    It is not a fear, it's a possibility that I live with. I understand that is the situation, and I have to accept it. They have done it before, and it is very possible they will do it again, but it is not something I fear every day. It is my situation.
  2. Version 2 Current

    Corrected against the source.

    To be forgotten too is to die a little. It is to lose some of the links that anchor us to the rest of humanity.

Others on this question

View all 256 →
Warren Buffett Chairman and chief executive of Berkshire Hathaway, 1970–2025
And now, you've got nine countries, including, you know, a guy in North Korea. I mean, and there will be, something will happen. And we worried enormously about it when there were two. And we had perfectly, we had really pretty sane leaders in Kennedy and Khrushchev. You know, I mean, you were not dealing with unstable people or anything like that.
Recorded Becky Quick, CNBC “Squawk Box”, recorded in Omaha; CNBC's own transcript of its own broadcast, 31 March 2026 source ↗
Tom Lubbock Art critic
I think that loss of speech, and of understanding of speech, and of understanding of writing, and of coherent writing – these losses will amount to the loss of my mind. I know what this feels like and it has no insides, no internal echo. Mind means talking to oneself. There wouldn't be any secret mind surviving in me.
Recorded The Observer, from the journals he kept between 2008 and 2010, 7 November 2010 source ↗

More from Aung San Suu Kyi

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Question What is an unusual habit or small pleasure you are oddly fond of? Daily life
Long years ago, sometimes it seems many lives ago, I was at Oxford listening to the radio programme Desert Island Discs with my young son Alexander. It was a well-known programme (for all I know it still continues) on which famous people from all walks of life were invited to talk about the eight discs, the one book beside the bible and the complete works of Shakespeare, and the one luxury item they would wish to have with them were they to be marooned on a desert island.
Recorded Oslo City Hall, The Nobel Foundation, 16 June 2012 source ↗

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