We study quasilinear elliptic equations of the form , where is a bounded function, V(x) is allowed to be singular at the origin, and is a general nonlinearity. Such type of equations has been derived as models of several physical phenomena corresponding to various types of . Despite the lack of a priori compactness condition for the energy functional, we develop a new variational approach to deal with the issues of multiple radial solutions, nonradial solutions and sign-changing solutions.