title to a work is like a house's portal; It should invite you to go in

"A good title should be like a good metaphor.  It should intrigue without being too baffling or too obvious."
Walker Percy
"The title to a work of writing is like a house's front porch.... It should invite you to come on in."  Angela Giles Klocke
"In conversation you can use timing, a look, an inflection.  But on the page all you have is commas, dashes, the amount of syllables in a word.  When I write, I read everything out loud to get the right rhythm." Fran Lebowitz
"Read, read, read.  Read everything- trash, classics, good and bad, and see how they do it.  Just like a carpenter who works as an apprentice and studies the master.  Read!  You'll absorb it.  Then write."  William Faulkner
"The greatest part of a writer's time is spent in reading, in order to write;  a man will turn over half a library to make one book."  Samuel Johnson

"Omit needless words. Vigorous writing is concise. A sentence should contain no unnecessary words, a paragraph no unnecessary sentences, for the same reason that a drawing should have no unnecessary lines and a machine no unnecessary parts."
--William Strunk, Jr.
More at: http://www.bethanyroberts.com/writing_quotes.htm