Dillon: "[Susan] Sontag, in her diaries, claiming to write essays not to persuade but to produce an effect. She says this knowing the aphoristic statement is an example of what it describes: the aesthete's attitude to essayism"
Dillion, similarly, says that he has "[a] constant suspicion, unchanged since I was a student: that nothing I write pursues and audience or is built to convince. Instead, I simply get into a mood about the thing I am meant to be writing about, and pursue that mood until it is exhausted or has filled the space it was meant to fill"