“The arrival in Paris, as grim as ever. The leprous façades of the Pont Cardinet flats, behind which one invariably imagines retired folk agonizing alongside their cat Poucette which is eating up half their pension with its Friskies. Those weird metal structures that indecently mount each other to form a grid of overhead wires. And the inevitable advertising hoardings flashing by, gaudy and repellent. ‘A gay and changing spectacle on the walls.’ Bullshit. Pure fucking bullshit.”

“It's all bullshit, folks and it's bad for ya.”

“Our brains contain one hundred billion nerve cells (neurons). Each neuron makes links with ten thousand other neurons to form an incredible three dimensional grid. This grid therefore contains a thousand trillion connections - that's 1,000,000,000,000,000 (a quadrillion). It's hard to imagine this, so let's visualise each connection as a disc that's 1mm thick. Stack up the quadrillion discs on top of each other and they will reach the sun (which is ninety-three million miles from the earth) and back, three times over.”

“This was the Karachi now – barbed wires protecting consulates, the pretentious covering themselves with faces of those who were hiding behind those barbed wires. This was Karachi – gaudy and luxurious, with a façade of glamor, ignoring the truth underneath. But Sophie was no cynic, and still loved the city she had returned to. ‘You can’t hate what’s yours,’ she smiled to herself.”

“All the fakeness just rolls right off them, maybe because the nonstop sales job of American life has instilled in them exceptionally high thresholds for sham, puff, spin, bullshit, and outright lies, in other words for advertising in all its forms.”

“Yes! That's what all our talk about a decent world has been... just so much bullshit.""We did say it was still only a dream.""And a bloody useless one at that. Life's a fuck-up and it's never going to change.”