How to really escape a double quote?

["MarkS." <throaway@yahoo.com>]

This is a two part question, but both parts are looking for how to
escape a double quote AND have it work with Emacs.

I was looking for a way to make Emacs delete inside of delimiters the
way Vim does. I found some code that some nice person had written. The
key search line is like:

  (skip-chars-backward "^(<[“") (setq p1 (point))

but there's no double quote, which is what I need most often. I looked
up Emacs/lisp documentation on-line, and it said that I could escape a
double-quote with a slash. So I tried changing the line to:

  (skip-chars-backward "\"^(<[“") (setq p1 (point))

But when I run the code, it can't find the escaped double quote. It
seems to ignore it.

So, how do I get code like this to recognize an escaped quote mark?

The other part of the question is, how do I get a key mapping that
uses double quotes?

I tried

  (global-set-key "\c-x\"" 'delete-stuff)

but this gave me all sorts of errors. However, if I activate global-
set-key interactively, I can set control-x " and it works to activate
the function. So there must be some way to make emacs recognize double
quotes in a key-mapping.

Thanks!