The dove act? I’m still working on it. I don’t think it’s perfect yet. I got my first pair of doves when I was 14 years old. That was the beginning of the formation of that act. So it’s been 24 years now that I’ve been working on it.

In the South, dove hunts do not draw quietly to a close. Sometimes, at the simplest end, a grill and cooler are hauled to the edge of the field, and the doves’ breasts are grilled – usually swaddled in bacon, maybe with a jalapeno tucked inside – as the hunters tell and retell tales of the day‘s shooting.

But for 30 years, Orthodox leaders have tipped the balance between hawks and doves, and have been in a position to determine who forms a coalition and who runs the country.

There was an obvious display of blatant sexism when I couldn’t get signed. They didn’t say I was ugly. They didn’t say that they didn’t like the music. They said I was too old! At 26! So Badly Drawn Boy, Doves, Elbow, James Blunt – you can be a gnarly old beardy bloke with a bit of a paunch and that’s all right?

I like doves. They look so beautiful, like a woman. For me they represent peace and love and purity. And sometimes they’re seen as the messengers of God, so they’re important to me because I’m a Christian.

The more bombers, the less room for doves of peace.

My good health is due to a soup made of white doves. It is simply wonderful as a tonic.

I’m not the guy who does slo-mo, or I’m not the guy who does splashing rain or doves flying or anything; that’s not me. Every film, I try and make it the way I see it in my head, and it really just depends on the script and the people I’m working with or whatever interests me at that particular time.

Prince turned experimental music into pop music. ‘When Doves Cry,’ the whole ‘Purple Rain’ soundtrack – he was inspired by the Cocteau Twins and new wave pop and brought it into R&B when he first started, and then it became this cool, next-level, kind of hard-to-digest music. Which is what I felt ‘House of Balloons‘ was.

‘Love’ is so short of perfect rhymes that convention allows half-rhymes like ‘move.’ The alternative is a plague of doves, or a kind of poem in which the poet addresses his adored both as ‘love’ and as ‘guv’ – a perfectly decent solution once, but only once, in a while.

Doves oppose war on the grounds that the risks exceed the gains. War with Iraq could be very costly, possibly degenerating into urban warfare.

Argentina and Burma. I have been to most of the countries in the world, but not those two. I want to shoot doves in Argentina. Burma, of course, because no one has really been there.

Sometimes, violent details have been eliminated from fairy tales simply because they were deemed too graphic. So one does not, at the end of Disney‘s version of ‘Cinderella,’ see the stepsisters’ eyes get pecked and pecked by doves, because Disney wanted to market the story for wholesome family viewing.

I’ve had pigeons, doves, mice. I had a cat, dogs.

When I was young, I asked my priest how you could get to Heaven and still protect yourself from all the evil in the world. He told me what God said to his children. You are sheep among wolves. Be wise as serpents, yet innocent as doves.