Using apostrophe's within a text field

OK guys, here is my delima, which is probably very easy to solve, but I can't seem to find it. I am trying to get form fields to accept apostrophes within the input and stop crashing on me. I'm writing forms into a mysql database and everything works great unless the user enters a word like "won't" or "can't". Them it crashes during the form submit. What can I do to fix this stupid thing anyway? thanks in advance. Steve Smith