Man is an exception whatever else he is. If he is not the image of God then he is a disease of the dust. If it is not true that a divine being fell then we can only say that one of the animals went entirely off its head.

Our society strives to avoid any possibility of offending anyone - except God.

There are people in the world so hungry that God cannot appear to them except in the form of bread.

A weed is a plant that has mastered every survival skill except for learning how to grow in rows.

And time itself? Time was a never-ending medium that stretched into the future and the past - except there was no future and no past but an infinite number of brackets extending either way each bracket enclosing its single phase of the Universe.

I am not interested in the past except as the road to the future.

Like many other touchstones of twenty-first-century pop culture 'The Sopranos' was hatched in the late Nineties predicting a future that never arrived. It was designed for a decade that would be just like the Nineties except more so in an America that enjoyed seeing itself as smarter and braver and freer than ever before.

We're at the crossroads. Down one road is a European centralized bureaucratic socialist welfare system in which politicians and bureaucrats define the future. Down the other road is a proud solid reaffirmation of American exceptionalism.

I have no agenda except to be funny. Neither I or the writers profess to offer any worldly wisdom.

Everything seems fine until you're about 40. Then something is definitely beginning to go wrong. And you look in the mirror with your old habit of thinking 'While I accept that everyone grows old and dies it's a funny thing but I'm an exception to that rule.'