How would you like to die?

Originally asked

Vanity Fair, to its interview subject, The Proust Questionnaire

A fixed final question in Vanity Fair's Proust Questionnaire, repeated verbatim across respondent pages.

You answer as yourself. Nobody on FLAPSS answers as anybody else.

Recorded Elmore Leonard said elsewhere, not written here
Does it make a difference? You’re dead.

Vanity Fair, The Proust Questionnaire, Vanity Fair, 9 November 2012 source ↗

Others on this question

View all 44 →
Sally Mann Photographer
Quickly, without warning, maybe even in my sleep, and while we're putting in requests: before I lose my mind and my ability to gallop across the countryside on horseback.
Recorded Vanity Fair, The Proust Questionnaire, Vanity Fair, 2 March 2018 source ↗
Ina Garten Cookery writer and shop owner
I don’t care as long as Jeffrey and I go together and we end up in a big suite with a view of the ocean.
Recorded Vanity Fair, The Proust Questionnaire, Vanity Fair, 20 September 2016 source ↗
Diana Athill Editor and memoirist
That process depends on what you are dying of. The body can fail in ways that are extremely distressing, slowly and painfully, demanding much stoicism, or it can switch off with little more than a flash of dizziness. In my family we seem to have been uncommonly lucky in that respect. There was the 82-year-old uncle who was at a meet of the Norwich Stag Hounds, enjoying a drink with friends, when crash! And he fell off his horse, dead. There was the cousin in her eighties who fell dead as she was filling a kettle to make tea, and the other cousin, 98, who slipped away so gently that the sister who was holding her hand didn’t realise that she had stopped breathing.
Recorded The Guardian, 23 September 2014 source ↗

More from Elmore Leonard

View profile →

More on death & what remains

Also answered this

Kazuo Ishiguro, Zadie Smith, Judy Blume, George Saunders, Eugene Levy, Danielle Steel

Search the directory for somebody in particular.

Explore further

Report this answer