Or better yet, use single (non-interpolating) quotes when you don't take advantage of interpolation. This will free you from the constraints of escaping characters within strings (except for ' itself, of course-- and \ as tye points out).
Don't forget \, which must also be escaped inside of single quotes. You can be sloppy about this for cases when the \ is followed by something other than \ or your delimiter(s), but doing so usually gets you thinking that you don't need to quote \ which then leads to bugs that are hard to track down.
BTW, & is not interpolated inside of double quotes.