To overcook that plate of fettuccine.
What is your greatest fear?
Question
What has been your biggest disappointment?
Failure & regret
Question
What is the worst thing anyone has said to you?
Failure & regret
Question
Who most deserves an apology from you, and why?
Failure & regret
Question
What is the most important lesson life has taught you?
Time & hindsight
Question
Which moment embarrassed you most?
Failure & regret
Question
Which trait do you most dislike in yourself?
Identity & self
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 I can’t write.
The Q&A, The Guardian, 14 October 2023 source ↗
Others on this question
View all 256 →Figuratively doing nothing.
Michael Flatley
American step dancer
On my deathbed thinking I wish I would have done something that I didn’t do.
Something happening to one of my children.
More from Lemn Sissay
View profile →I spent my life searching for family. I travelled around the world to look each one of them in the eye. Unfortunately, but understandably, for most of them, I am their biggest disappointment.
When I was a child, a member of staff at Wood End Assessment Centre [a former children’s home in Wigan] bellowed: “He copies them poems off of Bob Marley records.”
The Prince and Princess of Wales for not knowing when to leave their home.
Life is not worth living if there is no one you would die for.
Also my most triumphant: 2017 at the Royal Court. Julie Hesmondhalgh reads my psychologist’s report over two hours. Every excruciating intimate word of it. Extreme verbatim theatre. One night only.
Believing in, even admiring, people who refuse to believe in me, and not believing people who do.
More on identity & self
- Which trait do you most dislike in yourself? 243 answers
- What did you want to be when you were growing up? 195 answers
- What most recently made you cry? 193 answers
- What is your idea of perfect happiness? 158 answers
- How would you describe yourself in three words? 111 answers
- What are you most proud of? 103 answers
Also answered this
Seth Meyers, Marina Diamandis, Willem Dafoe, Joseph Fiennes, Marina Abramović, Jane Asher
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- All identity & self questions
- The The Proust Questionnaire questionnaire — 5 questions from the same format
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