A starquake mechanism for pulsar glitches is developed in the solid quark star model. It is found that the general glitch natures (i.e., the glitch amplitudes and the time intervals) could be reproduced if solid quark matter, with high baryon density but low temperature, has properties of shear modulus ��= 10^{30~34} erg/cm^3 and critical stress ��_c = 10^{18~24} erg/cm^3. The post-glitch behavior may represent a kind of damped oscillations.

11 pages, 4 figures (but Fig.3 is lost), a complete version can be obtained by http://vega.bac.pku.edu.cn/~rxxu/publications/index_P.htm, a new version to be published on Astroparticle Physics