From Milan Kundera’s The Book of Laughter and Forgetting:

That conversation with the taxi driver suddenly made clear to me the essence of the writer’s occupation. We write books because our children aren’t interested in us. We address ourselves to an anonymous world because our wives plug their ears when we speak to them.

You might say that the taxi driver is not a writer but a graphomaniac. So we need to be precise about our concepts. A woman who writes her lover four letters a day is not a graphomaniac. She is a lover. But my friend who makes photocopies of his love letters to publish them someday is a graphomaniac. Graphomania is not a desire to write letters, personal diaries, or family chronicles (to write for oneself or one’s close relations) but a desire to write books (to have a public of unknown readers). …

Graphomania (a mania for writing books) inevitably takes on epidemic proportions when a society develops to the point of creating three basic conditions:

1) an elevated level of general well-being, which allows people to devote themselves to useless activities;

2) a high degree of social atomisation and, as a consequence, a general isolation of individuals;

3) the absence of dramatic social changes in the nation’s internal life. (From that point of view, it seems to me symptomatic that in France, where practically nothing happens, the percentage of writers is twenty -one times higher than in Israel. …)

But by backlash, the  effect affects the cause. General isolation breeds graphomania, and generalised graphomania in turn intensifies and worsens isolation. The invention of printing formerly enabled people to understand one another. In the era of universal graphomania, the writing of books has an opposite meaning: everyone surrounded by his own words as by a wall of mirrors, which allows no voice to filter through from outside.