Formatting when quoting/reading from book within book

I put this in grammar syntax, but maybe I have better luck here. Any help or suggestions would be greatly appreciated.

One of the characters in my novel is a novelist. Other characters quote his work, and in one chapter, he gives a reading with longer excerpts. I am struggling to format this material. All quoted material is fictional too as i wrote it.

In dialogue, (" ") when others are quoting lines from his books: do direct quotes of his material get an extra ' ' or appear in italics, or does it just appear in regular text? surely i need to allocate the lines to him.

During his reading, where he is reading from his own novels, how do i format this? - do i have to show with ' ' that it is a quote, as above, or just let him speak as normal, even it is a direct quote from his work?

there are also parts where people are simply reading from the books. and i include longer chunks of the novels. Do i skip the ' ' , use italics instead. How do the line breaks and indents go?

are there some good examples in famous works where these situations appear as a cross reference. - book parts within novels, etc.

thanks, EM

thanks for your advice!

[/QUOTE]How necessary are these quotes to the story? It might be better to leave them out.[/QUOTE]

hmm, good question. sometimes they are in dialogue, so i need them to belong to the author- the speaker is affected by these words, or has them in mind. but sometimes i put whole chunks in - esp in a chapter in which the author is at a reading, reading from his own books- here, maybe i just use regular dialogue " ", as it is already established it is his work he is reading.

then there are parts where characters are reading chunks of the book to themselves, silently. are they italicized?

the quoted parts in general are very important, because there is some emphasis on how books affect their readers, and this writer character is doing so throughout.

Thank you both. The publisher would certainly have their say, but what if I were the publisher? In Murakami's Wind up Bird, he does big chunks in italics without offset. I just checked. It didn't bother me much. But now i am somewhat confused about what wouold look best and be easiest to read. The publishing standards are not always the best options- they don't always improve a work.

thanks all. that's what i've done. the double quotes are only used when the quote is short - less than deserving of a separate block.