Styling text adds extra line breaks

Hello,

I’m currently trying to have a line display on my site that reads:
Contributed by (post author) on (post date)

I have the following code:
<p class=italic>Contributed by</p> <?php the_author()?> <p class=italic>on</p> <?php the_date()?>

It’s correctly calling the correct author and date information. However, I’m having trouble with the italics. When I style the text using <p>, wordpress automatically adds in <br />s to make it a paragraph. So what I’m actually getting on my site looks like this:

Contributed by
(post author)
on
(post date)

How do I get rid of the extra line breaks so that all of that text displays on one line?

Thanks,
Ben