- What is your current state of mind? Unsettled. Restless. (Permanent Status.)
- What is your favorite journey? To stay home.
- What is your idea of perfect happiness? Solitude. Followed closely by Donuts.
- What is your greatest fear? Mortality.
- What is your most marked characteristic? Impatience. Volatility.
- What is the trait you most deplore in yourself? Introversion. Restlessness.
- What is the trait you most deplore in others? Cruelty. Arrogance.
- What is your greatest extravagance? Gadgets. (Latest edition. Don’t ask how many.)
- What do you consider the most overrated virtue? Optimism.
- On what occasion do you lie? It’s rare.
- Dislike most about your appearance? I’m at peace with it all (except morning weigh-ins)
- Which living person do you most despise? Despise, such a strong word. No one.
- Which words or phrases do you most overuse? “Are you prepared to hear this?”
- What is your greatest regret? Memories of cruelty.
- What or who is the greatest love of your life? Family.
- When and where were you happiest? Right now.
- Which talent would you most like to have? Pianist like Beethoven. Writer like Steinbeck.
- If you could change one thing about yourself, what would it be? Less introverted.
- If you could change one thing about your family, what would it be? Accept that the Patriarch is right.
- What do you consider your greatest achievement? Our two children.
- What is your most treasured possession? Gadgets. All of them.
- What do you regard as the lowest depth of misery? The poor, the cold and the hungry in winter. Cruelty to animals.
- Where would you like to live? Home. Wherever home is.
- What is your favorite occupation? The one I’m in. Love it or leave it.
- What is the quality you most like in a man? Humor and humility.
- What is the quality you most like in a woman? Grace and kindness.
- What do you most value in your friends? Truth.
- Who are your favorite writers? Haruki Murakami. Mary Oliver. Steinbeck. Ted Kooser.
- Who is your favorite hero of fiction? Bugs Bunny.
- What is it that you most dislike? Meals without prodigious amounts of dessert.
- Who are your heroes in real life? No heros. I admire the gentle, the kind, the humble.
- How would you like to die? I wouldn’t.
- If you were to die and come back as a person or thing, what do you think it would be? A Golden Retriever. Or Bruce Springsteen.
- What is your motto? Never look back.
The Proust Questionnaire has its origins in a parlor game popularized (though not devised) by Marcel Proust, the French essayist and novelist, who believed that, in answering these questions, an individual reveals his or her true nature. (Source: Vanity Fair)