Time & Perspective Quote by Paul Mazursky

Mazursky’s line lands like a wry travel note from inside America’s cultural civil war: the coasts as literal islands and psychic fortresses, separated less by water than by taste, tempo, and the stories people tell themselves about success. Calling California and New York “islands” isn’t geography; it’s sociology. Each place is a self-sealing ecosystem with its own language, its own hierarchies, its own myths of reinvention. One sells sunshine and second acts; the other sells intensity and first principles. Both can feel like nations with airports.

The “Maybe” does a lot of work. It frames the move not as a grand declaration but as an actor’s shrugging survival strategy, the kind of pivot that happens when your current scene stops giving you good lines. Coming from Mazursky - a filmmaker and performer associated with urbane, neurotic, character-driven American comedy - the joke carries a bruised practicality: if the industry, the friends, the mood, or the politics of one island turn claustrophobic, you hop to the other and pretend it’s a fresh start.

There’s also a sly admission about privilege and portability. Only certain careers let you treat the country like a set change. “Change islands” is the fantasy of mobility dressed up as casual banter, masking the anxiety beneath: the fear of becoming culturally landlocked, professionally irrelevant, or emotionally stuck. The punchline is that islands promise escape, but they’re still bounded. You don’t leave isolation; you trade one kind for another.