What I do is comment out those items so that if I change my mind later, it's easy to restore. This needs to be done in index.php, page.php, and single.php. Your code will vary from mine due to different themes.
I put my own text to remind myself in a commented out line above the code like this:
<?php # reminder to self: uncomment area below to add author name back to articles ?>
<?php
/* <img src="<?php bloginfo('template_url'); ?>/images/PostAuthorIcon.png" width="14" height="14" alt="PostAuthorIcon"/> <?php _e('Author', 'kubrick'); ?>: <a href="#" title="<?php _e('Author', 'kubrick'); ?>"><?php the_author() ?></a>
<?php $icons[] = ob_get_clean();
*/ ?>
Remove the items in red if you wanted to show those items later. Hope this helps.