Abstract. We study the existence and nonexistence of positive, spherically symmetric solutions of a quasilinear elliptic equation (1.1) involving p-Laplace operator, with an arbitrary positive growth rate e 0 on the gradient on the right-hand side. We show that e 0 = p − 1 is the critical exponent: for e 0 < p−1 there exists a strong solution for any choice of the coefficients, which is a known result, while for e 0 > p − 1 we have existence-nonexistence splitting of the coefficientsf 0 andg 0 . The elliptic problem is studied by relating it to the corresponding singular ODE of the first order. We give sufficient conditions for a strong radial solution to be the weak solution. We also examined when ω-solutions of (1.1), defined in Definition 2.3, are weak solutions. We found conditions under which strong solutions are weak solutions in the critical case of e 0 = p − 1.